But the loss of authority in our schools can be seen on a much more elemental level as well. One need not be a tweedy classicist yearning for the bygone days when secondary school students all studied Latin to recognize this missing component in education. You don’t have to look at the books and lessons. You can see it on the faces of the teachers, in the cowed words of the administrators. They’re scared of their students.
I don’t mean that they think their students will hurt them physically. Rather, they are afraid to assert any real authority, to stand in the places of adults and representatives of a good and lasting order and pass any serious judgment on the habits and choices of their students.
But this fear has real consequences in classroom discipline, too. As one of my graduate students, a high school teacher at a public charter school, put it, “If my students realized the full extent of my legal powerlessness in the classroom, and if they were so inclined, they could ensure that we never learned anything for the rest of the year.”
Since my first article, Spotted Toad published in this same space a persuasive account of recent tendencies in K–12 education. He argues, in effect, that a new authority and authoritativeness is in fact already eclipsing the old supposedly morally neutral, non-authoritative meritocracy. Indeed, schools cannot escape their role as purveyors of authority. In Spotted Toad’s description, the “successor ideology,” the religious revival of the Great Awokening, is a return of the idea of authority in the American classroom and lecture hall, but the authority it respects is a terrifying, barbaric, illiterate one.
John Peterson