We should also, I hope, continue to think about just what kinds
of pain and threat of pain coerce students to endure and put up
with these dehumanizations (to use Freire's original term).
There is pain in the results of such institutional diminution,
pain in the process of being diminished, but also pain strictly
used to gain the control necessary to inflict this dehumanization.
You cannot dehumanize someone unless you have power over them
first, and the ground of that power usually turns out to be
a capacity to inflict pain with impunity. We don't beat students
much any more, but we do threaten them constantly, and these
threats must have a painful reality behind them or they would
not succeed as often as they do. Who are our Enforcers? JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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