What Is Not Learned When an Adult Is Always Present

Some things can only be worked out in the absence of anyone who already knows the answer.

The presence of a capable adult solves problems. That is what makes it valuable, and it is also the whole difficulty. When a disagreement arises among a group of young people and an adult is standing there, the disagreement is generally resolved by appeal. Someone explains, someone adjudicates, and the matter closes. This is efficient and often fair. But the resolution belongs to the adult, and the practice being exercised is the practice of appealing to authority. When no adult is present, the same disagreement has to be settled by the parties themselves, using whatever they can devise: argument, precedent, threat, compromise, or the simple recognition that the alternative is the end of the game.

Negotiation of that kind is uncomfortable to watch, which may be why it has become rarer. It is loud, it is unfair in the short run, and it produces outcomes that no adult would have chosen. It is also the only setting in which certain competencies can be practised, because those competencies consist precisely in operating without a referee. You cannot learn to hold your own position against a group while an authority is available to hold it for you. The skill and the supervision are mutually exclusive, not because supervision is bad but because the skill is defined by its absence.

The same applies to less dramatic matters: judging what a group will tolerate, working out how to enter a game already in progress, discovering that a rule can be changed if enough people agree, learning that boredom eventually produces an idea if nothing else interrupts it. None of these is taught, and none can be. They are byproducts of unsupervised duration. That is an unsatisfying conclusion, because it cannot be turned into a programme, and anything that cannot be turned into a programme tends to lose ground to things that can.