actually help to fill out the field of "educative relations", so to speak,
with a glimpse of the continuum involved.
what we might be talking about, in emotional bonds and education, more
generally,
is the relation between a subordinate (student, player, trainee,
apprentice, etc) and an authority figure (teacher, coach, trainer, master,
etc);
and there is a fantastic vulnerability in this relationship, of course.
certainly,
this relation between subordinates & authorities manifests differently in
contexts of gender-relations, class-relations, race-relations, and so on.
Boys will bond with the coach (father) who is not expected to "nurture" but
to train these boys to be "men", which transports a barrage of hegemonic
baggage into the relation, but which doesn't alter the internal dynamic of
attachment and identification. And as Kathie pointed out, women in these
positions are impossibly positoned as the "destructive nurturer", fine for
little kids but when the young folks need more intelligent guidance, gender
privilege takes over.
Whether one is treated "well," or "poorly", by the authority in this
relation, there is a underlying connection, transference, which
rationalizes the relation.
Shoshana Felman's book ("Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight:
Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture")
speaks on this.
So a person may learn from a teacher she hates because deep down she
identifies with this authority-relation; another student may relate
negatively to this relation suppress the conflict, and appear
"noncooperative" or "resistant",
someone may do very poorly with a very sweet coach because the kid
identifies kindness as "feminine", and thus de-masculinizing...(desirable
for gay boys, for instance)
whereas homophobic boys will desire a different masculinity from their coach...
the complexities of the relation between teacher/student-player/coach is so
critical in the contexts of learning. (oops I'd reckon I just wrote a
"duh.")
in any event, it is not just about "liking" someone, or learning from
someone, but it is about this relation of transference and "love."
if we are agreed that knowledge is not content but relational, if
epistemology is ontologically recognizable (ooo-eee), then the
relationships here are more than situational, they are internally
historical, and specifically gendered.
diane