“I want to bring up one issue you were talking about in schools as far as coercion and repression,” he began.
“You definitely have a point as far as the way that some people, maybe even the way that some teachers, certainly some administrators, and definitely people in power are using…using their power in a negative manner.
“But trying to look at it on the other side in terms of the kids that I am involved with every day: like say if I’m trying to bring across a point about something like math or social studies or a poem, and, if, like, a specific example: if my kids are jumping out of their seats and making a lot of noise, if I’m trying to bring across this point or get them to see an idea or maybe even come up with their own idea, if like no one’s listening to what I’m saying or if they’re being disruptive, don’t I necessarily have to say, ‘O.k., listen, we need to calm down. You need to get in your seats and be quiet?’
“And sometimes they do. But if they don’t, don’t I need to say? ‘O.k., I have a job to do, and these are things I need to do. If you don’t do this now, I’m going to have to put your name on the board, keep you after school, blah, blah, blah, something, something.’ So we can get across what we’re trying to get across. It’s not a matter of ‘I’m going to control your little lives,’ but it’s a matter of ‘Look, there’s people that want to learn. There’s things that I would like to address, points I’d like to bring up, opinions I’d like to get from you. And if you’re not paying attention…” Then sometimes asking nicely or trying to have a democracy doesn’t work, and you have to get the point across right then and there. So it’s not a matter of control. It’s amatter of trying to get everyone in the community to be involved. And sometimes when they’re little kids they don’t know the difference, necessarily, or sometimes they don’t, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, between when it’s time to listen and when it’s time to socialize.”
Kevin begins with a concession which is really not a concession. The point he wants to concede is that some people in power do, indeed, use their power badly, even abusively. The agreement he’s offering, however, is not with what I’d been arguing. His proposition has some truth in it but it’s also trite and, in this context, evasive.
I had been arguing that we raise children wrong, according to systems predicated on belief in and application of repression and coercion and punishment and reward. Inherent in these systems is the practice of power. It is, after all, only by means of power that someone can be made to do something or be prevented from doing something.
Even when the use of power is apparently benign, that generosity is only one option, and the options are in our control only to the extent we succeed, by catering to their desires, in influencing how those in whose control they are (those who hold and exercise power) determine their own (and consequently our) options. (In other words, we are brought up to be strong in submission and compliance. That’s also what makes us dominate or want to.) Thus I wasn’t saying that some people use power well and complaining that others don’t. And I wasn’t saying therefore that people in control of power over others must be wise and must also be subject to further controls upon themselves so that power is always subservient (no matter how powerful it is) to other power.
I was arguing for an end to systems which breed subservience and control, domination and submission, no matter how refined and democratized. I was arguing repression and coercion ought not be the ways we choose to model either the human personality or the social order because for the operation of repression and coercion power is essential. Power, in this context, means the ability to make someone do what you want and to prevent him from doing what he wants. To effect this you’ve got to be able, ultimately, to hurt him beyond his capacity or will to resist so that he must actively do what you require and refrain from what you forbid. And it won’t even be against his will: his will will have become yours, the will you have installed after you have defeated his desire. Power and love, therefore, as they are commonly understood and practiced, can, unfortunately, look quite like each other.
Kevin is also conceding something real: things are difficult in school; the environment is uncomfortable for the kids and for him, too. He attributes this to the fact that the people who define and enforce the system don’t use their power wisely. It is undoubtedly true they don’t. But that is not really the issue, for the existence of “power,” as I have been showing, is predicated on the existence of a social structure established on the foundations of repression and coercion and eliciting human participation in its projects through punishment and reward. It’s a wretched circle which suggests we should jettison all parts. Repression and coercion demand power for enforcement. Power, to operate, requires repression and coercion. In either event punishment and reward are the tools which enable all three.
Kevin then shifts focus to get to where his own actual experience is. His idea of his job is “to bring across a point,” whether in math, social studies or literature. He’s giving them information and trying to shape the way they think about it. And the kids? They are jumping out of their seats and making a lot of noise. The information doesn’t grab them. They don’t get or care about his points. (They’re trying to make a point of their own.) But he’s got to make them. (“Them” refers to his points and to the kids.) He’s got to make his points and he’s got to make the kids listen to him make his points, internalize them and make them back to him.
The major lesson now becomes not the point he’s trying to bring across but making them listen to the point he’s trying to get across. He insists, “neces- sarily,” that he has to say, “O.k., listen we need to calm down. You need to get in your seats and be quiet.”
First, he says “we need,” and then “you need.” It is, in both cases, a strange construction. Is he getting excited? Does he need to calm down? Does he use the word, “need” because he is in touch with his own feelings? Or is he trying to insinuate himself in theirs? In any case such speculation is overtaken by the subject shift without alteration of the verb in the next sentence. “You need.” What does that mean? He is telling them what they need? But how can he know that? So he really means “I want you to need to do what I tell you to.” And then he can control them by playing their needs, just as a charioteer plays the reigns of the horses he is putting through their paces. Moreover, he gets his glory by showing their grandeur is harnessed to his will as he is carried along by them.
It is important to linger over the verb, “need” as it is being used here. This is a very familiar usage. One hears it everywhere. Parents say to their children, “You need to sit down.” ‘You need to be quiet, etc.” But, of course, the kid doesn’t need to. The parent requires him to. (The parent would argue the kid doesn’t know he needs to and therefore needs the parent to tell him. Sounds like brainwashing, especially when they’ve got the power to make it stick.) Similarly, we are told we need to fill out a form, or to go to a certain office or perform a certain task when we haven’t the need in the least but are required by someone or other enforcing some policy or other. “You need” is a euphemism with teeth for “I require you to.”
Now, if I’m going to require you to do something, I have to have the power to enforce the requirement. And this is what Kevin next deals with. If the kids don’t listen to him, he asks rhetorically, “Don’t I need to say? ‘O.k. I have a job to do.’” Now he is using “need” as something that is required of him, and, thereby saying that it is not his choice to be that way but he is forced to, has to, is required to by the situation. He “needs” to do what he is doing by way of enforcing attention because they have not given it willingly. He is not responsible for his actions. The kids are. If he inflicts any sort of pain, it’s their fault. They’re making him do it. They are not doing what they are required to do. He has to make them. He wishes he didn’t. He wouldn’t have to if only they were reasonable: if they had capitulated and conformed to the program. His behavior, he conceives, and he wants the kids to conceive too is a fact of nature rather than a construction based on a social hypothesis.
We are told all the time and righteously that behaviors have consequences. And that is true, but not in the way the advocates of this proposition rhetorically intend. If I don’t plant in the spring, nothing will grow; that’s a consequence. If I join pieces of wood in a certain way, I make a table; that’s a consequence. If I join them badly, the table will wobble; that’s a consequence. I go under the rain, I get wet; that’s a consequence. Every one of these consequences is a consequence of and within the nature of things. If, however, you punish me because I don’t follow your instructions or don’t do what you like, this is not a consequence of my action but of your will and disposition, belief and ideology, era alive and place living. It’s not a consequence; it’s an intervention
Not only are the kids and not Kevin responsible for Kevin’s actions according to his exposition, but so is the fact that he has a job to do. The expression “to have a job to do” currently is used to exonerate the doer of the job from the responsibility of having done the job. The expression is often used with regard to soldiers more or less excusing them from responsibility for the brutality required of them and to excuse the brutality itself. Doing the things which are done in war is their “job.” That’s supposed to end the discussion and make you incapable of further argument.
As he’s making his case, it becomes clear Kevin doesn’t see how narrow it is. It’s not strange to him, as it isn’t to most people, that the kids are forced to be in a place where they are forced to listen to him. He cannot see that the “disruption” he laments is a function of the coercive system he is defending.
The kids are preventing him from doing his job, he feels, as if his job were independent of them. It is as if they were getting in the way of what he is doing to some one else. Certainly they are not voluntary partners in a mutual enterprise. To get to them, he must overcome them. His comments show clearly that beneath the structure of classroom cooperation is institutional power, which he can draw on in the form of detention and other sanctions which he alludes to (“blah, blah, blah, something, something”) but does not specify. This momentary linguistic collapse signals that he is less focused on the actual experience of the persons being punished (he does not bother to articulate an actual situation) and more on the effectiveness of the punishment (he alludes to an abstract possibility).
In any event, he is imposing on the kids. That’s why he needs an arsenal of credible threats The kids haven’t contracted for his services or even spontaneously felt the need for them. The state has; perhaps their parents have; but they haven’t. Education, thus, happens not with them but in spite of them, to them.
According to Kevin the school system and punishments, discipline and such willing obedience that it is no longer even experienced as obedience but as eager receptivity are justified “so we can get across what we’re trying to get across.” Notice he has switched from “I” to “we.” He is appropriating the authority of the system for himself. He sees himself as a compelling agency and a representative of authority now, as having the same interest as the powers he has at the beginning in large part condemned.
And he is also intent on exculpating himself from any charges of tyranny. Just when he is trying to control them entirely, he objects “It’s not a matter of I’m going to control your little lives.” (Why does he call their lives little? It’s not an affectionate diminutive. Rather, it is a way of hardening himself, devaluing the privacy, the individuality, the self-referentiality of each person).
“It’s a matter of,” he continues, “there’s (sic) people that (sic) want to learn.” So, the reasoning goes, because someone else wants to do something, you have to be forced into submission. He is controlling them but, according to him for good reason and rightly, and that lets him deny he’s controlling them
It is, of course, only the teacher’s rhetorical hypothesis that other people want to learn. He is trying to marginalize each kid and make them all guilty. But really, if you want to do something and I don’t, I don’t care if you do it as long as you don’t make me do it. If school weren’t compulsory and our community were rich with opportunity, those who’d want to be there as he got his points across would, and the rest would not have to be disruptive. (“As long as you’re going to make us go to school and be obedient and not consult our individualities, we’re going to have to be disruptive,” they might say. “After all, there are consequences.”) They’d be somewhere else where their desire, interest and vitality weren’t being disrupted by the school.
When he says “if you’re not paying attention,” he means “you have to pay attention.” Then he says something quite astonishing and which ought to be alarming: “asking nicely or trying to have a democracy doesn’t work.” There’s an emergency? “You have to get your point across right then and there.” Why? And then he becomes positively Orwellian in his ability to hold contradictory thoughts simultaneously and feel allegiance to both: “so it’s not a matter of control. It’s a matter of trying to get everyone in the community involved.”
Suddenly it’s a community. So community, that thing which develops from the free association of fellows of similar interests (and is the social form democracy takes) now is being used as that form of social control imposed upon individuals for whom community is come to mean conformity. Moreover, “trying to get everybody in the community involved” is a euphemism for making the kids do what you think they ought to because you think it’s good for them and it would gratify your ego if they confirmed your capitulation to authoritarianism with theirs. It is also strange to hear Kevin say the school can’t afford to be a democracy. The United States is touted as a democracy, yet one hears often just the sort of thing Kevin is saying: School, work, the army, etc. are not democratically run. A society cannot be democratic when the institutions it constitutes and which compose it are not.
Kevin has not denied that lying at the root of schooling are coercion and repression, nor that punishment and reward determine behavior there. He is excusing these facts by saying the kids, because they’re little, “don’t know the difference…between when it’s time to listen and when it’s time to socialize” and they must be made to. Of course, he does, because it is arbitrary and determined by him and his superiors.
Kevin argues the kids have to (should want to) do what he wants them to because he and his higher-ups say it’s good for them. Therefore, if the kids don’t, it’s o.k. to force them. Implicit is the assertion that if everybody would just cooperate with the repressive/coercive system, those who run the system wouldn’t have to use coercion. Even when the ends are good, (in Kevin’s case: accomplishing learning), coercive/repressive methods betray and corrupt them. Here they violate exactly what learning entails: a willed engagement arising from within with something which so engages that it shows curiosity to be a natural part of the soul and devotion of the spirit. The schoolmasters aim to make the kids unhesitatingly obedient to an imposed order, and not even through thought or analysis but by such capitulation as is successful only when forgotten.
