Irrational Authority

The general timidity which cuases teachers to make niggers of their students usually includes a more specific fear - fear of the students themselves After all, students are different, just like black people. You stand exposed in front of them, knowing that their interests, their values and their languages, are different from yours. To make matters worse, you may suspect that you yourself are not the most engaging of persons. What can protect you from their ridicule and scorn?

Respect for authority. That's what. It's the policeman's gun again. The white bwana's pith helmet. So you flaunt that authority. You wither whispers with a murderous glance. You crush objectors with erudition and heavy irony. And, worse of all, you make your own attainments seem most accessible but awesomely remote. You conceal your massive ignorance - and parade a slender learning. The teacher's fear is mixed with an understandable desire to be admired and to feel superior - a need which also makes him sling to his "white supremacy". Ideally, a teacher should minimise the distance between himself and his students. He should encourage them not to need him - eventually or even immediately. But this is rarely the case. Teachers make themselves high priests of arcane mysteries. They become masters of mumbo-jumbo. Even a more or less conscientious teacher may be torn between the need to give and the need to hold back, between the desire to free his students and the desire to hold them in bondage to him.

Another result of student slavery is equally serious. Students don't get emancipated when they graduate. As a matter of fact, we don't let them graduate until they've demonstrated then willingness - over 15 years - to remain slaves. And for important lobs like teaching, we nuke them go through more years just to make sure. What I'm getting at is that we are all more or less niggers and slaves, teachers and students alike. This is the fact you want to start with in trying to understand wider school phenomena, say, politics, in our country and in our countries.