The course of free education prepared the birth of the humanistic approach, and at present it is the humanistic approach that has become the ideological basis of free education. However, not all varieties of free education fit into the humanistic approach.
The humanistic approach in psychology and pedagogy is based on the following assumptions:
- Every child has a positive core that needs only help to develop.
- The ideal of development is a harmoniously developed personality (a personality with a uniform development of all sides)
- The child is born initially free. Freedom is given to us, every child owns it.
- The initial freedom of the child is an absolute value in itself, which cannot be exchanged for other, external, social values of others.
- A child cannot be brought up within the framework of a certain worldview. (See Tolstoy about education)
- In education, pressure, coercion and manipulation cannot be used, turning the child into an obedient puppet in the hands of the educator.
If so, then we can state that the pedagogical concept of J.-J. Rousseau, the founder of free education, cannot be fully attributed to the humanistic approach, since he suggests and openly promotes hidden, manipulative methods of influence of the educator on the pupil (see →). It can be seen that soft forms of manipulative influences are also used by other psychologists and educators who consider themselves both a free education camp and a humanistic approach (A. Neill, Carl Rogers).