Leaders....Follow the leaders

It is one of the strange, and very hidden dangers of teaching - any teaching -  namely the problem of power.
 Power is always at stake in teaching; without it the very ability of the teacher is questioned - authority breaks down, and with it trust in what is being taught; and once that has gone, then all teaching ceases: all that are imparted are a random sequence of half truth.
Power matters therefore to teachers, we need it.
And yet, power warps the powerful, of course it does. It is so easy for a teacher to assume that somehow the power they wield is justified and right. All the more so as the power is often hard won, and potentially problematic in itself. It needs therefore to be substantiated, by an assumption that the power is somehow justified and simply 'right';  the implication then being what that power breeds, what abuses or assumptions are also necessarily right.
 Now in the past the relationship was of crisscrossed by voilence. Teacher could wack children and did often. It then went through a period where work itself became the issue. If one wanted to enforce authority, then one made the students work harder, or pointlessly. And now of course we express the same abuse in terms exams, and endless regulation. we make kids feel small, by making them feel stupid: By revealing that stupidity, not only to them, but also their peers...And at the same time of course, on a slightly bigger picture, the 'powers that be' in education (politicians and regulators) wield their own power over teachers. The struggles of kids and teachers, are then caught up in a wider struggle of politicians, with all that entails...
 Of course one has to be so very careful in all this. Power and teaching goes together, of course it does - and power and abuse goes together, just as naturally; for once one has power it is next to impossible to pitch it right. Indeed the anarchist in me thinks it is impossible for power to be otherwise. There is no point, one moment its righteous exercise becomes an abuse. On the contrary, the two sides of power are caught up together, abuses are justified, from other angles, or if the mood music changes...
 The problem any epoch in education faces is therefore where it draws its lines of power - and how it links learning to discipline and so to thought. There is probably no right and wrong here, only exercise and consequence. The fatal mistake that adults make is that kids do know what is happening and why. Of course they do, they are just pragmatists and accept it all - but then of course of judge it and  its justifications in their own way and in their own time. A thought I think that is so difficult for adults to encompass, that they ignore it - much to the cost of the over all system.