So far as the analogy to schooling goes, I think one sort of
criterion worth applying is the one that emerged in contrasting
"coercion" and "cultural constraint", the former a matter of
adjustable degree, the latter pervasive (and the latter determining
what level of control, and means of control, are perceived as
coercive or violent in a culture).
If a culture's norms and ideals favor 'discipline' and 'structure'
or 'order' or 'harmony' (what these mean vary a lot), then members
of that culture will generally behave accordingly, defer to community
interests, need less policing, and tend to approve of the use of
coercion for community purposes against 'deviant' individuals. In
their perception, and action, they would support a view that family,
clan, village, company, 'corporate' in the generalized anthropological
sense, or possibly even 'national' interest should and does take
precedence over individual pursuit of private interest. The question
I think is where, and when, and for whom, and to what degree this is
true in different societies.
A community which does the will of a small clique only because
they are constantly intimidated and physically hurt, and which does
not identify their interest or common interest with the actions
of this clique, and does not believe that the violence against
individuals who resist the clique is justifiable in the interest
of the community -- such a group might very well have a fundamentally
communitarian sense of interest in its cultural norms, and still
be judged, by outsiders' reacting to members' own judgments of
their situation by insider cultural criteria, to be oppressed, or
heavily coerced.
Real communities of course tend to be very complex mixes of
subgroups and interests and even cultural norms, but I think
the basic analytical principle I've sketched would at least be
helpful in sorting things out.
If we take schools and classrooms, there are some basic structural
problems at the outset: the student population and the teacher-
administrator population are strongly divided by age and generation,
which is a caste separation likely, in our cultures, to be reflected
in both different perceptions of interest and possibly different
cultural norms and ideals, values and beliefs, as well as obviously
different degrees of power. In many schools there are also racial,
ethnic, and other caste-and-culture differences between these two
groups. If, despite these differences, students generally acted as
if they believed, and said they believed, that: the curriculum of
the school was in their best interest, the rules of the school were
in their collective interest, and most disciplinary coercion used
against other students was justifiable ... then, subgroup by
subgroup, we might conclude that students assented to schools. If
this were so, then resistances and disciplinary problems in schools
would be isolated, individual incidents, with no statistical
patterns correlating with other social category factors.
I think one should be extremely wary of macrosocial generalizations
(such as working-class students resist middle-class curricula
and teaching methods, or African-American students resist European-
American domination of schools, etc.), but I do think that on a
school-by-school and subgroup-by-subgroup basis one can and should
use macrosocial categories to help in analyzing whether people
believe they are being coerced against their interests, and where
their perceptions of coercion and interest are typical across a
social category (female, gay, poor, black, hispanic, jew, malay,
catholic, minor, ...) and in systematic contrast with those of
some other social category with whose members they are in
interaction and conflict.
I am not trying to offer universal or culture-independent
criteria for coercion or social justice, but to _invoke_
culture- and subgroup-SPECIFIC perceptions and voicings/actions
as the grounds for making such judgments. Anyway, these are
some of the ways I try to think about these difficult and
complex issues. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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