@Autolykos
Warning: weird and pointless “What about the children” rant! But, I suspect there might be something in my experience that may be in the way here, so I’m going to just put it out there. Sorry in advance!
I’m not sure if I mentioned it or not before, but perhaps it is necessary to mention that I am an ESL teacher (primarily in private language schools). I have to teach children often as young as five or six, some of whom have had no demonstrable exposure to English. It is hard for me to describe what I regard as the necessities of teaching such a class, particularly in the culture I am operating in.
I cannot stand in front of a class and lecture in English. Using their native tongue, except in select instances and with the conceit that a taboo within the confines of the classroom has been violated for which I permit a student to literally slap me on the wrist (and I am aware that this may be sending a subconscious message of violence, although it is not my intent, and which, from the reaction I perceive, works as a good ice-breaker, since many children, especially rural children, regard foreigners as physically intimidating), is also an unworkable option. My overriding interest is in creating a ‘positive momentum’ in the class at virtually all costs, and it is not something that can be put off. You have about a month to set the tone, after which it becomes increasingly difficult to alter conditions. I pull out all the stops. I fill the class with my English and my antics, and work as fast as I can to get them to do the same, without leaping out of their chairs and distracting themselves or each other.
I have to override their natural instincts to not only communicate, but to think, in their native language. I must cajole the shy, joke around with the gloomy, intimidate the bullies, encourage (but also threaten) the unconfident, check the arrogant, calm the over-exubirant, all from the word “go” until I can form a cohesive unit out of the class. If I do not form a unit, a group of individuals who believe and feel that they have a demonstrable stake in the unit and that the unit has a demonstrable stake in them as individuals, the class will disintegrate. I see it happen all the time. A kid or eight gets left behind, allegedly because they are lazy or stupid and nowadays in need of medication (which really infuriates me), and become disruptive because they are bored, lost, and uninspired.
I am simultaneously getting them to “act up” and speak up and to get them to regulate themselves for the good of the group. In language education, I need to get them talking, writing, etc, not simply listening and passively regurgitating. In the culture I work within, kids are primarily controlled through shame and rote (and also corporal punishment although not as much as before), and I have to encourage them to break out of their habituated responses (submission or rebellion) by all sorts of means. What often happens is that when the kids realize that I’m not there to “master” them, they believe I must be all excited because it is play time. And, so, I often have to lurch between joking, etc, and stamping my authority, marking my territory, call it what you will–and I make a show of my temper as much as I do the other antics–until the unit becomes cohesive and that kind of thing becomes unnecessary.
Every day, I try to communicate by everything I say and do, that we are in that room for no other purpose other than for everybody to succeed together, and nobody, neither any individual student, the administration, the parents, nor I, is permitted to interfere with that purpose. (I have been fired for refusing to abide by an altered school curriculum, because I believed it would break the implicit social contract I had established with the students, namely that I would never ask of them anything I thought they were incapable of, in this case, using material designed for American students; but, I felt that that the implicit contract between the students and me trumped the physical contract between my employer and me). In that process, I have ordered kids to do things they do not want to do, that they are terrified of doing, that they refuse to do, sometimes to the point where I believe that the connection between myself and even an outstanding student is at risk of being ruptured, simply because I perceive that there is some character flaw in danger of limiting their development. I have threatened to order an academically excellent student for refusing to follow a command of mine, when I believed that I had come across what I regarded as a character flaw that would inhibit their future language development. On the other hand, I can’t tell you how many times some of the most allegedly incorrigible students turn out to be the most impressive both scholastically and personally after a few months.
The technique, in principle, is almost the same used by armies to train soldiers. There is a simultaneous dissolution of both their original confidence and their lack of confidence (their identity, which in my case, is bound up with the student’s language, as well) and the creation of a new kind of confidence bound up with the unit to some degree. And, it involves forcing people to do things they are unwilling to do and are absolutely convinced they are incapable of. I am not an expert on “brainwashing”, but I think many of those elements are there. At the same time, I firmly believe (although not without some doubts) that what I am doing is, on balance, good for the students.
From my perspective as a teacher, the critical question is the will of the students and the need for me to actively mold it. Part of the thing that makes me so resistant to some of the arguments made here, I think, is that the description of the relationship between the teacher and student often seems so remote from the reality; clinical, sterile. Almost every day, I feel as if I’m on a razor’s edge: Am I pushing this student too hard? Have I misjudged his/her strengths and weaknesses? Am I being manipulative because this is the best way or only way or because I am too lazy to come up with a better way? Did I do that because I am in a foul mood today? I cannot view it in terms of contract theory or ideology or something like that, only the interests of the student and the class as a whole, which I feel in my gut and cannot be put into a clear formula, except to say that somehow the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, a whole that is not formed voluntarily in the sense of conscious consent.
Sorry if I’ve taken this into left field.
But tell me, how does one measure “quality of consent”? And again, I must make the distinction between physical and non-physical coercion (using your definition of “coercion”). It’s the former - physical coercion - that I find morally wrong.
