> Bravo, Eugene!
>
> 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, as an elementary school teacher, I would have to say that
the first line of enforcers are the teachers themselves. One of the
primary driving forces of enforcement is the myth of the 'norm' and how
to structure a classroom around multiple norms : achievement test norms,
reading norms, behavior norms, etc. The concept of norm is translated
into normal which is then translated into good and proper and what's best
for the teacher to strive for.
Phillip
pwhite who-is-at carbon.cudenver.edu