To Sir With Contempt

Why aren’t there more radical teachers? Is it just the difficulty of being radical in a system built around compulsion, discipline, conformity, and reproduction of the class structure? Or is part of the problem the way that people become teachers?

As teachers did your professional education and employment push you to accept a role in which you do not make a significant difference, were you selected and molded to have politically and intellectually subordinate attitudes, thereby making your creative energies available to the system.

When did the idea of "assignable curiosity" come into fruition? When did they teach the use of exams, a powerful legitimating tool used to discriminate while still making it seem to be neutral? How was the nonpartisan exam system developed while actually imposing the values of the status quo? When was it that you learned to accept standard ideas about professional behaviour? Were you told there would be an ideological conformity you would have to subject yourself to?

Employed as a brain worker your work demands advanced degrees from accredited institutions, did it ever occur to you that you indoctrine students in the mysteries of skilled labour, in technical trades without critical thinknig, social conscience, or the will to resist. Does the lack of control over the political component of your creative work ever faze you? How do you accept the norms of your employers to function as semi-autonomous, self-directing workers?

Rooted in corporate capitalism founded on a heightened division of labor, you validate social-institutional hierarchies and legitimate your own place in them at the expense of others. You hold no monopoly on knowledge -- many non-professors know as much about your subjects -- but you act based on your own judgment to promote the establishment interests. You are constrained by law but in fact, more heavily controlled by hierarchically mandated, system-wide code of conduct.

Was it the higher income, status, improved working conditions and the capacity to choose more aspects of one’s work that motivated you to enter into this field of work? Did the institutional dominance redirect your work lives? Does promotion with professional ranks hinge on such work? Did creativity give way to perceived necessity? Do you ever notice your students become less idealistic and more exhausted from the work you assign to them? When did your socio-intellectual goals get replaced by selfish commitments to compensation and rising in one’s field?

Tell me more about the transformation from truth seeker to alienated knowledge worker seeking institutional advancement and not knowledge. What's it like to be a subordinate and disciplined mind engrossed in professional work.