Authority and Subversion

Willard Waller

Willard Waller (1899–1946) is remembered mostly for essays examining the balance of freedom and order in the classroom. Published originally in 1932, his "Sociology of Teaching" was an influential work that helped create a new field of study—the sociology of education. Waller believed it desirable to emphasize active participation and creativity in the learning process, but he was pessimistic about the prospects for doing this. In his view, the culture of classrooms and school tends to encourage teacher domination that in turn produces alienation among students.

The teacher-pupil relationship is a form of institutionalized dominance and subordination. Teacher and pupil confront each other in the school with an original conflict of desires, and however much that conflict may be reduced in amount, or however much it may be hidden, it still remains. The teacher represents the adult group, ever the enemy of the spontaneous life of groups of children. The teacher represents the formal curriculum, and his interest is in imposing that curriculum upon the children in the form of tasks; pupils are much more interested in life in their own world than in the desiccated bits of adult life which teachers have to offer. The teacher represents the established social order in the school, and his interest is in maintaining that order, whereas pupils have only a negative interest in that feudal superstructure. Teacher and pupil confront each other with attitudes from which the underlying hostility can never be altogether removed. Pupils are the material in which teachers are supposed to produce results. Pupils are human beings striving to realize themselves in their own spontaneous manner, striving to produce their own results in their own way. Each of these hostile parties stands in the way of the other; in so far as the aims of either are realized, it is at the sacrifice of the aims of the other.

Authority is on the side of the teacher. The teacher nearly always wins. In fact, he must win, or he cannot remain a teacher. Children, after all, are usually docile, and they certainly are defenseless against the machinery with which the adult world is able to enforce its decisions; the result of the battle is foreordained. Conflict between teachers and students therefore passes to the second level. All the externals of conflict and of authority having been settled, the matter chiefly at issue is the meaning of those externals. Whatever the rules that the teacher lays down, the tendency of the pupils is to empty them of meaning. By mechanization of conformity, by "laughing off" the teacher or hating him out of all existence as a person, by taking refuge in self-initiated activities that are always just beyond the teacher's reach, students attempt to neutralize teacher control. The teacher, however, is striving to read meaning into the rules and regulations, to make standards really standards, to force students really to conform. This is a battle which is not unequal. The power of the teacher to pass rules is not limited, but his power to enforce rules is, and so is his power to control attitudes toward rules.

Questions

1. Are students today more or less interested than their counterparts sixty years ago in "life in their own world," as contrasted with "desiccated bits of adult life" offered by teachers?
2. Is it still true that children "are usually docile" and are "defenseless against the machinery with which the adult world is able to enforce its decisions"? Has anything happened that might suggest a modification in this observation?
3. Have you ever participated in an activity undertaken to "neutralize teacher control"? What will you do if your own students some day initiate similar activities?

Source: Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), cover, pp. 195–196. Copyright © by Russell & Russell. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons.