Beyond Coercive Education: A Plea for the Realisation of the Rights of the Child in Education

Beyond Coercive Education shows that realising the rights of the child in our schools is critical to the well being, learning and development of children. The book provides a number of proven alternatives and how children's rights can be realised in education. The essence is respect for children as full human beings.

The book provides in 11 myths examples of the underlying assumptions of education. Many children and parents experience problems with school and in politics education is an often-recurring subject. The discussions on how education can be improved did not change over the last 100 years. It is focussed on the details of the educational practice and do not result in the necessary and fundamental change as the assumptions underlying education are almost never discussed.

Recommendation by Peter Gray, research professor of developmental and evolutionary psychology at Boston College and author of Free to Learn: Why Releasing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life:

"Peter Hartkamp is one of my heroes. He has, for many years, been struggling to make truly democratic education--education that respects the dignity, humanity, intelligence, and amazing natural learning drives and capacities of children--legal in the Netherlands. In this book he pulls the rug from beneath the shaky intellectual edifices that have been constructed by defenders of the educational status quo, and we see them topple. Hartkamp is not a wishful-thinking sentimentalist; he's a clear-thinking realist, with an engineering background, who brings that clear thought to an analysis of how we have become culturally trapped by an ineffective, inhumane educational system and how we can escape that trap. I recommend this book to everyone who cares about children or about the future of humanity."

More about this book on www.beyondcoerciveeducation.eu

Peter Hartkamp (1961) is a strategy consultant and founding member of three schools for self-determined learning and has been engaged in education, Dutch education law and the rights of the child over the last fifteen years.