Oppressor-Oppressed Dichotomous Thinking Is Destructive in Education
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that framing every educational relationship as oppressor vs. oppressed is reductive, dehumanizing, and counterproductive.
Key Takeaways
- Dichotomous thinking oversimplifies - Casting teachers as oppressors and students as oppressed ignores the complexity of educational relationships
- This framing is destructive - It poisons the collaborative relationship between educators and students that learning requires
- We're here to teach, not to oppress - Educators who hold high expectations and enforce rules are not engaging in oppression
Transcript
How can we have high expectations for our students without kicking them while they're down?
I think this comes up on a variety of fronts in education, whether it's grade inflation, giving students 50 free points, not counting missing work against them, making graduation requirements kind of a joke, and graduating students who don't actually even come to school at all.
When it comes to discipline and not having consequences, there are a lot of different fronts on which we're very uncomfortable with accountability and we're kind of forgetting why accountability is valuable to students and why we insist on accountability for our own children as parents, but feel guilty about it when it comes to the students that we work with.
And I think a lot of the problem is in our fundamental thinking about about students.
If we think about our students as just an oppressed class of people, and we think of the school and ourselves as educators as the oppressors, you know, this is a mindset that has crept into higher education in the last 10 years.
And that has kind of coincided with the time when I've been off campus, I've not been on campus of a college as a graduate student or anything in the much in the And the thinking there is that everybody in the world is either oppressed or an oppressor.
And if you have wealthy students, upper middle class students, white students, you might not think of them as oppressed.
But everybody else in student terms falls into the oppressed category in this way of thinking, this kind of reductive way of thinking about the world.
And as educators who have jobs and have a certain amount of privilege, we fall into the oppressor category.
Obviously, that is a reductive way of thinking about the world.
I'm not saying there's never any use for that way of thinking.
Sometimes it's a helpful lens.
But as just our fundamental way of viewing the world, I think it really dehumanizes our students to reduce them to simply victims, simply people who are being oppressed and not people who are worthy of our best efforts and capable of achieving great things.
No matter how...
downtrodden your students are, no matter how many obstacles they face in life, never stop believing that they are capable of great things.
You know, there are so many kids who grew up in very, very challenging circumstances and because they had people like you who believed in them, they were able to overcome those obstacles.
They were able to achieve great things.
But that's not going to happen if we see our students as oppressed and see ourselves as oppressors and see the very things that we need to do to build them up and to invest in their lives and to give them what they need to succeed.
If we see those as acts of oppression, we're never going to give them what they need.
And instead, what we're going to do is pity them.
I've talked about pity before and how pity feels good to us.
Like we feel like we're doing something noble when we pity someone, but we're really not.
Like it's really a very selfish emotion that allows us to indulge in fear.
feelings that are somewhat self-justifying.
Like I can justify my relatively privileged position and recognize it and recognize someone else's oppressed position through pity.
But pity is utterly worthless to the person that we're pitying.
We are not in this job to pity our students.
We are in this job to help our students, to build them up and to give them what they need to succeed in life.
So I think fundamentally, like whatever kind of decision we're trying to make, we have to get out of this really reductive and dehumanizing binary thinking of oppressor and oppressed, because that's just going to lead to policies that feel good to us as the quote unquote oppressors, but that really harm our students.
And again, one big example is discipline.
Like if we feel that any kind of discipline is oppressive to our students.
We're going to end up with unsafe schools that are bad for the very students that we're trying to help.
The most unsafe schools are going to be the ones where we're most hesitant to have any kind of discipline that allows learning to take place.
And who does that hurt?
It doesn't affect our own kids because they don't go to those schools.
It affects the very kids that we're here to help.
So let me know what you think of this kind of dichotomous way of thinking and how you're seeing it show up in education.