coercion

Betty.Zan who-is-at uni.edu
Wed, 17 Apr 1996 15:39:52 -0500 (CDT)

Francoise's posting brought up a couple of questions for me.

Francoise wrote:
>Hi everyone, I wonder about coercion and enculturation or perhaps how
>it is that coercion can be avoided given models of cultural transmission
>where differnt degrees of compression are observed.

1. What do you mean by compression?
2. Does cultural transmission have to be a given?

>Could a coercion-free education really exist is perhaps what I really
>am saying?

3. This is really the most important question for me. The first and second
grade teacher I mentioned in an earlier posting has created the most
coercion-free classroom I have seen to date, but even she has what are called
*have-to's* in her class. For example,

Sometime today, spend 15 minutes reading with a friend.

Now that is a *have to*, and so I guess technically, it qualifies as coercion.
However, look at the choices--the child can choose when today, what to read,
with whom, where in the class (in a corner, sprawled on the rug, etc.) So I
have a hard time calling that coercion in the same way that assigning children
to pairs, telling them to sit in chairs next to each other, giving them a book
(maybe a basal reader) and telling them to read to each other for the next 15
minutes is coercion. So, is coercion-free education possible? I think to an
extent. However, how do you convince educators that it is a worthwhile goal to
pursue? That's where I keep coming back to trying to find some way to quantify
the qualitative differences that I see in low-coercion classrooms.

Betty Zan