Philip, I appreciate your anecdote and your sensitivity to this little
girl. From a Piagetian perspective, however, we are constantly
accommodating our schemas to the external world, even as we are
constantly assimilating the world into our schemas. From a Vygotskian
perspective, the child's introduction to the world is constrained
by parameters set by adult actors. To hope for otherwise is to
imagine that the child exists without culture or prior to culture.
I am for humaneness in our dealings with others, but the search for
coercion-free interactions strikes me as irreducibly individualistic
in its orientation. I am going to go teach a class of college
students in about ten minutes. I will give them the option of whether
they want to go outside today or not. I will let them set much of
the agenda for discussion. I don't believe that the students in the
class generally consider me "cruel". Yet, our interactions are
constrained by cultural norms regarding what constitutes a "class".
We could not interact with one another intelligibly if we did not
share some understanding of the cultural norms in question. I think
for many people, the constraints of the lecture course are not helpful;
for others, the constraints of a discussion seminar are not helpful.
Some people can learn well in either context, others are not helped
by either. But it doesn't illuminate anything for me to label some
practices as "coercive" and others are not. Perhaps this is partly
because I'm not thinking of the gross instances of "coercion"
involving what most of us would consider abuse; instead, I'm thinking
about the constraining interactions of everyday life. Some people
thrive in the constraints of a given sociocultural group, others do
not. I don't believe that constraints per se are the culprit,
because I think that constraints per se are inevitable. Perhaps it's
a "goodness-of-fit" issue. Perhaps it's the issue of recognizing
the unspoken expectations in the constraints we operate by (very
difficult for most of us to do). A group consensus that "constraint"
is bad in education is itself a kind of constraint.
Robin