29. THE VALUE AND LIMITS OF DEMANDING SILENCE - On Remembering Power’s Roots and Reasons in the Classroom
In a recent RE lesson on Human Rights and Social Justice, my students picked up on a seeming discrepancy in their own lived experience of their rights compared to the rights they were supposed to have:
”The UN declaration says we have a right to freedom of speech, but teachers are always telling us to stop talking and we’re told off if we don’t do what they say.”
It made me realise that often neither students or teachers remember the justificatory roots for the powers, privileges and obligations which interplay within the classroom, and that this lack of awareness may well be the source of much student/teacher conflict at school.
As if to provide further evidence of this to me, this week I had detention duty after school, and had to sit with our “worst behaved” students for an hour, several of whom were losing this precious hour of free time - ten minutes longer than any timetabled 50 minute lesson - for “defiance” or “insolence”. Loosely translated as “talking back to a teacher” or “refusing to comply with a teacher’s instructions”. Now, full disclosure, I myself have put many students into such detentions over my career. But I like to think I have done so for genuine, and justified, educational purposes. Not, as it appeared, as I heard some of my detainees’ stories, purely out of ego and self importance; an expectation that just because I am a teacher a student should automatically do whatever I say and be punished if they do not.
I get disappointed so much by staffroom colleagues who reduce their discussions about student behaviour to one of rudeness and respect. Personally, I have no problem with a student being rude to me if it does not disrupt the learning taking place. Rudeness is unpleasant, but sometimes people are rude. That’s life. I have as much right as any other human being not to have people be rude to me, but no special extra right simply because I stand at the front of a classroom of children. And as a teacher I have to be cognisant of the strange power dynamic in place between teachers and their students that might actually lead to a student feeling justified in their rudeness (because they perceive us as being rude or disrespectful to them first, or in need of being challenged). I do mind rudeness, or even polite refusal to comply, if the behaviour creates an obstacle to the education of those I am teaching, however, because that is the whole purpose of our student/teacher discourse. If the rudeness undermines the learning, it is a problem in the classroom. Not because it is rude, but because we are no longer able to do what we are all there to do.
One of my Year 9 philosophy lessons each year is on the nature of authority. Students run the lesson, selecting a question of their own on the nature of authority to debate and discuss, and they are reminded constantly of their own innate autonomy throughout (that they have the power to leave the room should they choose to, or to simply not do as they are told), and they are also reminded of the limits of a teacher’s authority (I can set them homework to write me an essay, but I can’t demand legitimately that they go home and rob a bank for me. I have the power to put them into detention, but I cannot take away their PlayStation and ask that they be grounded at home as well). In all the years of running this lesson I have been able to do it without a single student walking out or refusing to participate, and this, I feel, is a testament to the lesson’s importance when it comes to the need for open understanding of authority’s boundaries in the context of the classroom. We teachers do not have authority for authority’s sake - we have temporary authority for a specific purpose, and so long as that purpose is both clearly identified and clearly being met, then students are happy - without threat of discipline - to, for want of a better word, “obey”. (How many university lecturers, for example, are plagued by bad behaviour? Exactly. Because the students want to be there and know why they are there. Those who don’t, stay in bed.) Yet the boundaries, limits, and justifying rationale for a teacher’s authority’s temporary existence, as I have said, are so often forgotten or, in some cases, not even known.
So I responded to the students asking about their human rights:
”You do have the right to freedom of speech. But if you read the whole UN document you will see that you also have the right to an education. And these rights are universal, so everyone in the classroom has the same right to a education and, as a society, this place - school - is where we’ve decided you will get it. So we have taken people’s tax money and built schools and paid for teachers and resources, and we have made it the law that you all have to go up until a certain age so you can get that education you are entitled to. And that means that, although you have freedom of speech, at this moment, in this context you are specifically here to learn. Everyone here is. That is the central function of being in this building: to get you that education. Because education has intrinsic value, but also because in a capitalist society like this one, where all those other things you have rights to like food and shelter come at a price and the jobs you are entitled to require academic qualifications, education has massive instrumental value too. Because if you don’t get a good education in such a society it can create a domino effect of obstacles to your ability to achieve all those other rights you are entitled to.
“And what that means is that if you’re in the classroom, your focus needs to be on learning, not just for you but for everyone else in the room who all have that equal right. So when a teacher asks for quiet so they can give instructions, or share some knowledge, or hear the responses and questions of your classmates, they are not violating your right to free speech, they are ensuring your right to education, and to all those other rights a good education is a requirement for in our current socio-economic system. You can speak freely when you leave the classroom, at recess, at lunch, at home…the right doesn’t go away. But these other rights temporarily trump that one right in the classroom so that learning can take place.”
The students seemed to understand what I was saying (and were all listening in silence, an assent suggestive that they found the lesson important enough to be worth briefly sacrificing their free speech for), but for many it was the first time a teacher had ever explained the rationale behind asking for quiet in their classroom.
”I just thought teachers weirdly liked quiet all the time?” said one.
”Me too,” said another. “I thought it was just about pushing their weight around.”
“Whenever I’ve asked before, I was just told you had to be quiet ‘because I said so’.”
It shocked me that students had gone through eleven years of schooling and never been explicitly told the reason behind why they ought to be silent when a teacher asks for it, but at the same time it wasn’t surprising. It is far easier to avoid the tricky conversations and ask for efficient compliance by simply enforcing the idea of “because I said so”, than to explain the justificatory arguments which legitimate it because those arguments expose a two-way covenant. The students ought to listen so they can be educated; but if that education isn’t happening, then the teacher loses the right to the authority to ask for silence. To explain the social contract on which the authority is justified is to open up the teachers, and the entire education system, to questions about the value of lessons being taught and the sort of things being passed off as “education”. It also is to introduce the questioning of all authority to young and impressionable minds. If the students question the authority of their teachers, they may also question the authority of their bosses, the police, the government…
Just as the army demand that soldiers obey all orders without question to get into the habit of immediate compliance for “operational efficiency” on the battlefield (if a soldier asks “why” when their superior cries “duck” in a war zone, they will likely end up dead, so the argument goes they should train themselves to not question orders at all times, even off the battlefield, to ensure their overall safety and efficiency when on it), the educational system appears to have forsaken such conversations with its students to ensure “operational efficiency” in the school, the future workplace, and in hierarchical society as a whole. However, just as with the army’s “operational efficiency”, the motive is questionable, and builds into it many assumptions about the moral legitimacy of the orders being given (in the army) or authorities demanding compliance (in society). More worrying from my standpoint as a teacher, is that teachers themselves are not really reminded of the justificatory reasons for their authority in the classroom and so do subscribe to the harmful myth that their position as “teacher” gives them some special right to demand from their students whatever they want, rather than only those compliances which ensure the right to education is accessible for all students in the room. Which is why some teachers seem to take undue pleasure in the fact that, in their classroom, students know never to ask to go to the toilet, or take a sip of their drink, or to take their jackets off when hot, or any number of irrelevant and punitive measures with which they exert their control. And it is why we have students being told off, in schools all over the country, for things they should not be told off for, which contributes to their general impression that teachers are “out to get” them and that we are unfair, even when we try to enforce rules which are genuinely useful and necessary for ensuring everyone’s education, ultimately leading to refusal to follow even those rules genuinely designed for their own good and to help them.
“But I can talk and listen at the same time, sir.” comes a reply from a student a few days later during the detention duty when I discuss these same ideas again. I have long refused to enforce the expected punishment for our after school detentions - students copying out the school rules - on the grounds that it is pointless and does nothing to ensure the students improve their behaviour, so, as always, I focused instead of talking about what got them in there and how they can avoid such punishments again.
I laugh. I used to say the same thing myself when my frustrated maths teacher would grab my book to show how I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to in her lessons only to see page after page of perfectly worked out equations.
But I am older now, and (somewhat) wiser.
“But not everyone can talk and listen at the same time,” I say, “and the right to education is meant to be universal. Personally, I can talk and work too, and when I am at home I never work in silence - loud punk music is always playing.” - The Offspring’s “Dividing By Zero” is on right now as I write these words - “but the classroom is not about just one student, it’s about all of them. Your talking might distract those around you, who can’t do what you can, and still have an equal right to education as you do, so we have to have a sort of neutral environment to teach in, so everyone has an even playing field. Then you can go home and do homework or further research in whatever conditions you want.”
The students nod in understanding. Again - the first time this has been properly explained to them. An important lesson: sometimes the world is not just about you and your preferences. It is about compromise, and ensuring the best for all. Sometimes rules are there for a reason, not to be mean or annoying, but to help.
I get asked a few more questions, mainly about why teachers are able to force them to do certain subjects they don’t like, or set homework that invades their free time. I reply that sometimes - not always - adults have a better long-term perspective than younger people, and that sometimes you may not be the best placed person to judge what you want just based on what you like (I cited diet as an example) and that being made to learn a broad curriculum of subjects means they don’t close potential doors on opportunities too early that they will regret closing when they’re older. The homework thing, I acknowledge, is pure garbage. And not all countries do it. In my opinion, while it is justified encouraging students to continue thinking about, practicing, studying and revising the ideas from the classroom in their own time, it is not justified to just set tasks for their own sake. If anything, it’s reflective of teachers perpetuating a cycle of abuse: we have to spend endless hours of our home-life marking and planning and so we normalise it by making it the norm for our students to give up hours of their own free-time each night to unnecessary work too. The abused become the abusers.
The conversation could have continued, but I pointed out to the detention group that their detention had ended three minutes ago and they were all free to go home. The whole room had stayed beyond their allotted hour, in silence, to listen to each other’s questions and answers on an issue that was important to them, without a single threat from me.
Author: D.McKee