From authority there is no escape. [Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death, U of Chicago P, 1985, p. xi]
Everyone older is a role model, and the elders are unrecognizedly inspiring in that young men or young women, without even being aware they are doing it, “breathe in” the way they are to conduct themselves today and tomorrow through their inescapable association with and fealty toward those who are a generation ahead of them. [Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard UP, 1994, p. 103]
[T]he important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of authority in education; it is not so much … that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming a child’s mind. In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself; for he hates something inseparable from human life. … The educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and coercive as the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses. … Now we must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence. Education is violent; because it is creative. It is creative because it is human. [G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 1910, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1927, pp. 252-253, https://archive.org/details/whatswrongwithwo00ches/mode/2up]
Insofar as the child is not yet acquainted with the world, he must be gradually introduced to it; insofar as he is new, care must be taken that this new thing comes to fruition in relation to the world as it is. In any case, however, the educators here stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is. This responsibility is not arbitrarily imposed upon educators; it is implicit in the fact that the young are introduced by adults into a continuously changing world. …
In education this responsibility for the world takes the form of authority. The authority of the educator and the qualifications of the teacher are not the same thing. Although a measure of qualification is indispensable for authority, the highest possible qualification can never by itself beget authority. The teacher’s qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about that world. Vis-à-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world. [Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961, Penguin, 1977, p. 189]
[I]f the teacher knows something that the students value, and she offers to teach it to them in a non-coercive way, they will learn to have respect for her authority. But she has earned that respect, not demanded it. The student is the final authority about whether or not the teacher has authority, a truth which students clearly demonstrate every day. Fear of authority masking as respect for authority is easy to get; just give the people with titles the legal power to mete out punishments and rewards. [Marshal Rosenberg, Life-Enriching Education: Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships, Puddle Dancer, 2003, pp. 112-113]
In The Lives of Children, Dennison made the important distinction between natural authority, which rests on experience, competence, wisdom, and commitment, on the respect, trust, and love of one person for another, and official or coercive authority, which rests only on the power to bribe, to threaten, and to punish. Many people find it hard to understand this difference, or to see that coercive authority does not complement and support natural authority, but undermines and destroys it. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, p. 106]
I have used the phrase “naked authority” to signify authority teachers arrogate to themselves when they expect students to accept what they tell them simply because they are teachers. The only authority to which genuine teachers, as opposed to indoctrinators, should appeal is the authority of the relevant reasons or the evidence supporting whatever is to be learned. In the absence of such authority, teachers cannot help students acquire knowledge that is understood. They can only indoctrinate them with the opinions they may or may not retain for long in their memories. Opinions adopted on the naked authority of teachers have little durability. [Mortimer Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 172-173]
Authority is given or it is fraudulent; it cannot be taken by force or ambition. [Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death, U of Chicago P, 1985, p. 161]
[A]uthority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed. [Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961, Penguin, 1977, pp. 92-93]
The good news is that parents naturally have authority over kids. We’re older, we’re more experienced, and (hopefully) we have better self-control than our kids. … The problem comes when we try to force this authority. Kids need limits to feel secure, and it’s right for us to play our natural role as the authorities in our families. But if we repeatedly push kids to do things against their will, if we argue with them about the same things over and over, if we lose our temper and get into shouting matches, our natural authority goes down the toilet. We’re lowered to the same level as an out-of-control child. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, p. 38]
Being-authority is grounded not only in the individual’s competence to fulfill certain social functions, but equally so in the very essence of a personality that has achieved a high degree of growth and integration. Such persons radiate authority and do not have to give orders, threaten, bribe. They are highly developed individuals who demonstrate by what they are—and not mainly by what they do or say—what human beings can be. The great Masters of Living were such authorities, and to a lesser degree of perfection, such individuals may be found on all educational levels and in the most diverse cultures. (The problem of education hinges on this point. If parents were more developed themselves and rested in their own center, the opposition between authoritarian and laissez-faire education would hardly exist. Needing this being-authority, the child reacts to it with great eagerness; on the other hand, the child rebels against pressure or neglect or “overfeeding” by people who show by their own behavior that they themselves have not made the effort they expect from the growing child.) [Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 1976, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 33]
[N]o strict and affectionate discipline can apply to children without applying, first and more rigorously, to their parents. From the rigor of that self-application, authority descends through the generations and so allows children, in the family order, to correct their parents; for it is the parents, first, who must be an obedient people; then it is that children have someone to obey. [Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death, U of Chicago P, 1985, p. 208]
When I ask parents what they think are the most important things a ten-year-old needs from his or her parents (besides the basics of food, shelter, and clothing), the lists that are generates are usually of this sort: Love, Understanding, Flexibility, Openness, Warmth, Humor, Open-mindedness, Ability to listen, Respect for the child’s individuality, Taking an interest in what interests the child.
Surely this is a list to warm anyone’s heart. But is this the whole story of effective parenting, of effective leadership as a parent? …
What the list is missing is a child’s need for parents who can exercise power on behalf of convictions, exert control, be righteously indignant, even express moral outrage (a virtue lauded by the Greeks and in woefully short supply at every level of modern American life). Power, authority, control are words that make people uncomfortable, especially in a context such as parenting, which is first of all about love. But perhaps effective parental loving of a ten-year-old must include competent executive functioning, a child’s sure sense that someone is in charge who believes in something and will stand for those beliefs. [Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard UP, 1994, pp. 78-79]
Power, authority, and control make many of us uncomfortable, in part because we have seen so many arbitrary and abusive exercises of power (especially at the governmental and corporate levels) that we come to feel that all exercise of power must be intrinsically arbitrary or deleterious. [Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard UP, 1994, p. 80]
Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served. …
Now, power may accompany authority, and perhaps it must. However, and more important, genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power. This constraint manifests itself when the authoritative agent cares, and takes responsibility, for those over whom the exertion of power is possible. … To adopt authority is to learn that power requires concern and competence—and that it comes at a genuine cost. … [I]n the real world, those who occupy positions of authority in functional hierarchies are generally struck to the core by the responsibility they bear for the people they supervise, employ, and mentor. …
The authority who remembers his or her sojourn as voluntary beginner … can retain their identification with the newcomer and the promise of potential, and use that memory as the source of personal information necessary to constrain the hunger for power. [Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Penguin / Portfolio, 2021, pp. 26-28]
Much of the ambivalence of adults toward “teen-agers” is, I should judge, simply a kind of repressed panic-response to the liquidation of authority over them. It must be understood, however, that the loss of authority is real; the adult empire is tottering. All empires are; this is the era of skepticism about the relationship between authority and status. It is an error, I believe, to interpret what is happening as a decline in respect for authority as such. American youngsters today are generous in according respect to parents, teachers, and other adults who earn it as individuals; and they are far more perceptive of individual quality in their elders than they could possibly have been when all adults were regarded as potentially or actually hostile and dangerous. But it is true that they are less likely to respect an adult today simply because he occupies a position of authority. [Edgar Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, p. 27]
[P]eople are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. [G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 1910, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1927, pp. 254-255, https://archive.org/details/whatswrongwithwo00ches/mode/2up]
Authority has been discarded by the adults, and this can mean only one thing: that the adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they have brought the children. [Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961, Penguin, 1977, p. 190]
[The crisis in education] can be schematically traced back to three basic assumptions, all of which are only too familiar. The first is that there exist a child’s world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and must insofar as possible be left to them to govern. Adults are only there to help with this government. The authority that tells the individual child what to do and what not to do rests with the child group itself―and this produces, among other consequences, a situation in which the adult stands helpless before the individual child and out of contact with him. He can only tell him to do what he likes and then prevent the worst from happening. …
As for the child in the group, he is of course rather worse off than before. …
[B]y being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority. In any case the result is that the children have been so to speak banished from the world of grown-ups. They are either thrown back upon themselves or handed over to the tyranny of their own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel, with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and out of which they cannot flee to any other world because the world of adults is barred to them. The reaction of the children to this pressure tends to be either conformism or juvenile delinquency, and is frequently a mixture of both. [Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961, Penguin, 1977, pp. 180-182]
The young are moved, bag and baggage, into areas where adults cannot help them, and it is a scary landscape they face, it is crowded with strange forms and faces, and if they return from it raddled, without balance and pitched toward excess, who can pretend to be surprised—or blameless? [Peter Marin, “The Open Truth and Fiery Vehemence of Youth,” 1969, The Cosmos Reader, edited by Edgar Z. Friedenberg et al., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, p. 809]
The chief and most damaging of the competing attachments that undermine parenting authority and parental love is the increasing bonding of our children with their peers. … [T]he disorder affecting the generations of young children and adolescents now heading toward adulthood is rooted in the lost orientation of children toward the nurturing adults in their lives. … For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role—their own peers. They are not manageable, teachable, or maturing because they no longer take their cues from adults. Instead, children are being brought up by immature persons who cannot possibly guide them to maturity. They are being brought up by each other. [Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, 2004, Ballantine / Penguin Random House, 2024, p. 7]
Moreover, … in recent decades [there has been] a most serious neglect of the training of teachers in their own subjects, especially in the public high schools. Since the teacher does not need to know his own subject, it not infrequently happens that he is just one hour ahead of his class in knowledge. This in turn means not only that the students are actually left to their own resources but that the most legitimate source of the teacher’s authority as the person who, turn it whatever way one will, still knows more and can do more than oneself is no longer effective. Thus the non-authoritarian teacher, who would like to abstain from all methods of compulsion because he is able to rely on his own authority, can no longer exist. [Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961, Penguin, 1977, pp. 182-183]
We fail in [our] boundary-managing duties whenever we make children into adults (for example, by having them share the palpable or psychological burdens of our leadership) or make ourselves into children (for example, … by not claiming our greater authority, competency, or entitlement to lead; or by suggesting we could operate as peerlike confidants of our children apart from our roles as their parents). [Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard UP, 1994, pp. 80-81]
The family requires a certain authority and wisdom about the ways of the heavens and of men. The parents must have knowledge of what has happened in the past, and prescriptions for what ought to be, in order to resist the philistinism or the wickedness of the present. …
Parents do not have the legal or moral authority they had in the Old World. They lack self-confidence as educators of their children … [Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon & Schuster, 1987, pp. 57-58]
All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. …
School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education. [Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 11]
Related:
– What are the effects of coercion in education?
– What do we teach via our character and the environments we create?