Four conditions!

All four conditions are necessary for legitimate teacherly authority

There are four conditions that need to be met for teacherly authority to be legitimate (I showed these graphically in this post).

The first is the ‘teacher’ (who can be any person, but often an adult) needs to have a capacity which is greater than that of the ‘student’ (who can be any person, but often a younger person).  The second condition is that the teacher must have the desire to teach this capacity in the best interest of the student.  These are the two conditions on the teacher.

The third condition is that the student must recognise the difference in capacity and, importantly, must value what it is that the teacher is wanting to teach. The fourth and final condition is that the student willingly agrees to take on the role of the student and therefore willingly to pay attention to the teacher and to wherever the teacher directs their attention.

Kintsugi - the art of healing wounds with gold

When all four conditions are in place then students willingly do their best work, they are visibly highly engaged and quality learning can take place.

If any of the four conditions break down, then the social dynamic that teacherly authority represents will also be weakened or even broken altogether and the desired cultural transmission will be compromised.

The commonest breakdown occurs when condition three is not in place – the student does not value what is being offered, and this often leads to condition four being broken using inducements or threats of punishment to gain the student’s attention.  The crucial, willing acceptance has gone.

This set of breakdown conditions seems to occur so naturally and so frequently that the very idea of legitimate teacherly authority has become undermined such that the small number of teachers who exercise high levels of legitimate teacherly authority (what I have called enlightened teachers) are often not acknowledged nor do their peers attempt to emulate them.

It is time for a change.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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