I don't know if I'd put this in the category of 'treating them like adults'... children are built to acquire skills. That is the central aim of their brains an

I don't know if I'd put this in the category of 'treating them like adults'... children are built to acquire skills. That is the central aim of their brains and they are particularly well formed for it. What we're treating them like is not adults (as we do not expect adults to be studious or continually learning), but an imaginary fiction of what children should be. We've constructed an image of children that does not correspond with reality. We see a child being well-behaved and attentive to arbitrary authority figures as a necessary part of being a 'good child'. In reality, those attributes are destructive to human beings. Kow-towing to authority simply because it is authority, and not because it is presenting convincing arguments and ruling by persuasion, is not conducive to anything that would entice a human being. I would also say seeing this as 'treating children as adults' isn't quite right because it coexists with our society aggressively infantilizing adolescents. We've redefined adolescence as simply more childhood, denying the neurological and psychological developments that come with puberty in order to continue to perpetuate the imaginary ideal of a perfectly submissive a-personal child. And still, they are judged by their submission as they become more aggressively oppressed, subjected to high schools which afford less freedom to their students than convicted felons receive in prison. The goal of schools is supposed to be to convey knowledge and skills to children and adolescents. The tactics that have been adopted since roughly the mid-1990s seek to impose this knowledge on students rather than to encourage learning. And it's not effective. If you treat human beings like prisoners, even the children that everyone is so convinced are utterly incapable of self direction, the result will be resistance and "misbehavior". The day the misbehavior stops is the day anything 'human' inside that person dies.