ABSTRACT
Humanism is the quintessential egalitarian theory. It allocates equal worth to all people and bases teachers’ status on being skilled at what they do rather than from having power over students. Although Bill Glasser places teachers in a leadership role, humanism goes beyond this by advising that teachers facilitate student achievement. Three strands inform the humanist view of children. First, in a constructivist understanding of children’s learning, humanism trusts children’s innate capacity for growth as they strive to become all they can be. The second strand is a statement about children’s goodness: humanism contends that children are equally capable of considerate behaviour as they are of looking out for themselves. Third, it believes in children’s status as human beings. Supported by concepts emerging from the sociology of childhood, humanism asserts that age is no barrier to human rights. Humanism and choice theory reject the premise of applied behaviour analysis, which states that external events dictate our behaviour.
