Since I don't think of myself, or some others who've seconded
some of the points on reducing coercive approaches in education,
as having a strongly individualist bias, this perception is worth
hearing. My concern with reduced coercion is not primarily to
increase the freedom of action of the individual; it is a concern
rather with what excessive (in my view) resort to coercion says
about a community (that it is likely to be using this coercion
not to enforce social cohesion alone, but to promote special
interests for the coercers as a social category).
My idea of the fundamental difference between individualistic and
communitarian social arrangements is not that the one maximizes
individual freedom and the other minimizes it, but that the
agendas for activity in the first case tend to be individual
agendas aimed toward individual interests, while the
communitarian model favors collective agendas that promote
community interests (family, clan, village, etc.). In the latter
sort of cultures, I do not believe that coercion is more
prevalent because the internalized norms of the culture
(constraints not felt as coercive, or as less-painful, more
naturalized 'coercions') will inculcate dispositions to recognize
the primacy of group interests.
Both extremes of social order are subject to abuses. The one I am
mainly concerned with occurs when the collective interest becomes
perverted into the special interest of those articulating or
enforcing the agendas. I believe that high levels of coercion are
symptomatic of this condition because other members of the
community feel this perversion (either thru their dispositions
for the collective norms, or from their sense of individual
interest) and resist such agendas, which can then only be
enforced coercively. This is precisely where I see active
coercion going beyond normal/normative cultural constraint and
predisposition. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
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