Student as Enemy

"You gotta stay on top of those kids or there's no telling what they're gonna do!"

"You give them an inch and they'll take a mile!"

After listening to these comments in the teacher's lounge, you go somewhere else and open up an education journal. Then what do you see? Military metaphors, such as "tactics," "maneuvers," "strategies."

I am not one to cast the first stone, because there are times in which I myself slip into such a hostile view of students. Furthermore, there are reasons for this view, as harmful as it is. And most of those reasons can be found in:

Keen, S. 1986. Faces of the enemy: Reflections of the hostile imagination. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Although the educational setting may have been the last thing on the author's mind, this book does have important implications for teachers.

Throughout most of our evolutionary history, we had to resist enemy invasions. In order to survive these invasions, we had to take a degrading view of those enemy invaders. Diplomatic missions, foreign language cassettes, and anthropological studies were no help because they didn't exist.

Throughout those millions of years, an adult was never intended to act alone as caregiver for 20-40 children. There was only one setting in which we faced anyone in such large numbers, and that was on the battlefield. There was only one group which we faced in such large numbers, and that was the enemy.

A mere instant ago, we established an institution known as the school, where we intentionally brought in 20 to 40 children for every adult caregiver. In effect, then, we staged an enemy invasion against ourselves. Naturally, then, we saw this school setting as a battlefield and we saw the students as the enemy. And our view has changed very little since.

In his book, Sam Keen presents excerpts and illustrations from the hate propaganda of nations, religious groups, and other groups throughout history, and points out some commonly recurring themes in this propaganda. Here is a selection of those themes which we hear most often in the teacher's lounge.

The enemy as beast, reptile, insect, germ (pp. 60-64)

The Nazis posted cartoons which portrayed Jews as rats. Now that they were relegated to a separate species, they were easier to exterminate. I once had a co-worker who carried a ruler around all day and said, "Boy! These kids act like wild animals!" several times a day. Could she have been operating on the same principle?

The enemy as barbarian (pp. 43-46)

When I was in the fifth grade, we had a fad of paper fortune tellers. Even at the time, I wondered why the art teacher didn't take advantage of

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