On the Abuse and Use of Institutionalized Authority in Education

For several decades, students had a monopoly on the issue of “violence.” Violence in the schools was “youth violence” – bullying, gangs, vandalism, school shootings. It is now only fair that the violence of educators moves to the center. However, unfortunately, with quite a wrong thrust: the tenor is that screwed up pedophiles have sinned in their function as role models. It will be shown that this is not the case.

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But first a clarification: When adults sexually assault children, i.e. coerce them into sexual intercourse or the like, this has nothing to do with love, even with “pederasty.” That always requires a reciprocity of feeling. Also, where force is involved, it is not even mere lust for sex. That implies, even if does not involve great feelings on both sides, at least the will of all participants for such a desire to give pleasure. Their desire for children is then nothing but a bad mixture of carnal satisfaction and the pleasure of their own power over dependent young people. Such a thing has nothing to do with “liberated sexuality.” Such a perversion of love's pleasure is not explained by the special character of the teaching profession nor a disease in the form of a genetic deviation or brain abnormality – as, for example, apologetically fabricated by brain researchers of late.

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It is not so simple: these and other brutalities in the sex lives of the republic are much too widespread. On the Internet, degradation of each gender and any age is enjoyed in ideal form, and is all available in reality for money. Where – generally – men presume to have an imagined right to service their superb manhood and are able to enjoy it in the rape of women as an act of submission; where the “good uncle” as well as the father imposes his smut on children by using and claiming parental authority – from the law's “natural right of parents” to care for and bring up the child; where men – again, mostly – demand their female partners confirm their naturally outstanding qualities in bed and will not be appeased without it; it is obvious: in the private sphere and even in their most intimate areas of life, a sense of entitlement all too often prevails which claims power or uses conferred power for private urges of the worst kind; whether this viewpoint is derived from the power of the state-mandated task of parents and teachers to raise the young, whether it is brushed off as an assumed right of the male race or derived from the bread winner's control over the universal access power of money – it casually skips over every established moral barrier in this country. Someone who is entitled, who thinks of his concerns or needs as a right, and especially he who just imagines he has a right, sets his interest above all others, declares it valid against any will that conflicts with his and therefore feels authorized to occasionally use force to impose it. He has learned in school that a right entitles the use of force, as the constitutional state uses all its force to make rights valid – even if the connection between interests, rights and force is presented somewhat differently there, i.e. state interests are seen as universally valid not because of their functionality for capitalistic economies, but because of their overriding moral qualities as human rights – protection of private property and democratic rule – and that's why they must be defended against any attack, even in Afghanistan. All the same, more or less every citizen contrives his own interests, which seem so important to him, in such a way that he then declares them his private rights and, if they are not in line with the state's legal system, asserts them by force.

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If one resists confusing explanations with excuses, one can learn from this connection that child abuse in public or private, secular or religious educational institutions is not a fluke – just its prevalence alone speaks against this – nor is it the invasion of perversions entirely foreign to education into institutions which have to carefully take on the care, development and instruction of the young. Rather, these sorts of sexual inclinations find in education institutions favorable conditions for their realization. Choirboys, boarding schools or students present a unique opportunity for those educators with and without robes who “fancy boys.” What should really speak for the occupation in which one “works with people,” especially the young, now seems unsavory. The heavy responsibility which should distinguish this activity in comparison with occupations in which the person is supposedly only dealing with things is not denied at all. In fact, a lot depends on it concerning the later moral, intellectual and practical suitability of the younger generation for all the services which capitalism holds ready in the upper or lower functions. That's why this responsible work is organized by the state in all schools in the form of a legal relation which sets up and maintains the educator-student relation as a sanctions-backed coercion regime. Precisely in this – this is the second step – lies an extensive pedagogical arsenal which is good for taking advantage of such opportunities for abuse.

At the same time, however, and this should be pointed out in the end, this coercive regime in school is the reason all kinds of uses are aimed at which are not at all good for children, but which do not count in this country as abuse.

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Certainly, today's state-established compulsory school regime over children has little to do with the old methods of the spanking paddle, although it doesn't want to give up violence in other forms either. The reason for this does not lie in education in general, but in what school education in this country wants from children and does with them today. It uses the “natural fact” of the still incomplete wills of children in order to instill in them a program that aims at their self-confident, mature submission to the “seriousness of life.” This has little to do with learning, thus with providing the will with the knowledge that would enable adolescents to intellectually control their world in order to make it conform to their needs. Rather, they learn to bend to compulsory education, to follow the orders of the teaching staff despite their reasons, and to subject the appropriation of knowledge to a time dictation which does not produce understanding, but inserts competition into learning so that a sorting of the young into school winners and losers results in a quite irreversible verdict. This is how the right of educators to command “underage children” is perceived and practiced according to the school program. The recalcitrance of the child's will is almost preprogrammed into it. That must be mastered by the teacher and succeeds quite without a paddle, by means of motivation techniques and the extortion inherent in them, “advocacy” which refers to inherent constraints whose representatives are the teachers themselves, psychological hurts like withdrawal of affection, embarrassment before classmates or racist exclusions, the use of grades, references to school punishments and the threat of parental notification as a means of discipline, etc. It can be assumed that now and then additional physical force will probably be used, but it makes no difference. Modern methods of submission – whose representatives find fault with a pedagogy of knuckle lashings only because it is dysfunctional for an education aimed at turning out “mature citizens” who obey voluntarily and not because they fear a beating – are at least as repulsive as the famous ear boxings which have now fallen into disrepute. That's because the educators replicate this arsenal of ways and means of influencing the will as the “care” they give students: In everything he does with them at the educational institution, the teacher is sure that he only wants “what's best for the child,” that he alone knows what is “best” for the child, and that he also therefore really deserves the affection of his pupils. This immediate equation of his state task with a service to the child is part of the professional morality of the teacher. It implies that children exist as material for their own “self-realization”: this then is called “avocation” or “passion for teaching.”

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If educators now hold their right over children as the most natural thing in the world, can't conceive of education any differently and take the forms of psychological and physical power that go with it as pedagogical tools which of course are always used only for the good of the child, then one should not be surprised that they also make this right and the related arsenal of more or less refined methods of torment into the means of their longing. Thus for some teachers the opportunity, means and malicious need to sexually oppress subordinates come together in educational institutions. The child-friendly professional morality of the educator completes this scenario. This is especially true of boarding schools with their hothouse family ideology, in which the difference between professional activities and private life blurs and intimacies that surpass the standards announced in every public school characterize the relationship between teacher-authority and dependent student. No wonder that ruthless sexual inclinations discover almost a special offer in such a swamp.

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Also in the way such teachers construe their offense – before or after – they often strive for continuity with the arsenal of their specific duties: here teachers might justify their deeds with the requited love of children, play it down as provisional care, imagine it a right to obligations from students who they did this or that for and for whom they have made sacrifices, refer to the ancient Greeks, portray it as a pedagogical act of sexual liberation, declare it God's will or fate, etc. – it is always about legitimations that exist due to the tribulation of having offended against morality, whose guardians they are normally supposed to be.

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At the moment, the horror is enormous and doubt grows as to whether either religious or secular educators can continue to be left unchecked with those to whom they have to be role models. However, this doubt does not announce any cleaning up or even examination of the coercive relationships in education. Sexual abuse and beatings should be prevented. The other normal uses of power in education are not on trial, although they are really something. Hence it is not a scandal of school education that children are instructed in a use of the mind which asks only whether they get good grades; that children are forced into a learning competition in which, if they want to be the winners, they must make losers of the others; that this involves learning to cheat and self-deception, opportunism and brown-nosing, school bullying and all the show-off techniques by which one becomes the center of attention in school; that students must learn to hide gaps in their knowledge from the grade judges and think it is normal that intellectual deficits, which are produced by school, are to be punished; that it is perfectly accepted that learning in the classroom is organized by time pressure so that losers and winners always come out in the desired proportions; that the teacher, who of course is supposed to be there for all students, is often not there except for his grade book; that social behavior is emphasized as an education purpose in an institution where copying a neighbor's results and letting the neighbor copy your results is not valued as help but seen as cheating; that children are presented a canon of material which aims to make them at home in a society that later produces in the majority of graduates the desire that their children will have it better than them some day; that – to speak of the “human dignity” of the child – one can't go to the toilet without a pass and permission from the teacher and chewing gum in your mouth can lead to disciplinary punishment; that more often expressed disinterest in the lessons – “attention deficit” – is diagnosed as an illness and is then treated with sedative pills if the student concentrates quite highly on his own interests and diligently pursues them; that also deficits in math, reading and writing, to which elementary school contributes, are raised to the level of an illness; that children have anxiety about achievement assessments, dare not go home and hand in a bad report card, etc. All of this is school and is part of an education program in which young people are made fit for a competitive society; that's why teaching how to tolerate frustration and relieve stress are emphasized recently – which says a lot about the society in which they later have to organize their lives.

But that would be a new subject, the use that the work world in this country systematically makes of people whose “poor education” turns into material poverty. And even that does not count as abuse.

[Arguments taken from an essay by Freerk Huisken]