Comparing teachers to cops
It's the first day of school. I betray myself probably, because I've no respect for nearly anyone who (didn't) teach me. There are so many who were grossly abusive. So many, it was ongoing, just normal. So, I have serious concerns. I know there's improvements since the 90s-2000s. but I don't think those institutional problems just go away by now.
I do try to couch my baggage. In these comments I'm saying that the school is an oppressive system. Mitigating the system, which I know is better, doesn't undo the oppressiveness.
This is basically the reform issue. I do believe in reform. You should try, as an individual, to improve the system within your tiny amount of power. But doing this can actually help that system become a more effective parasite. So I think it's important to complain about the reform, even while you are reforming.
Responding to, “teachers are part of an oppressive system” a teacher says that I'm basically calling ACAB. It's a tough thing to respond to. I am not trying to say that. But there is... a thread, I don't want to say it, but it's there. It's real and painful. Teachers are not ACAB, but also, as authorities that punish, they have some things in common with cops.
The operations of school authority— profiling, punishment and control— there are some similar methods of operation, similar psychological consequences. They're enforcers of rules that often make no sense. They say things like, “because I said so.” React unjustly with behaviorist manipulation, then say, “but these are the consequences of your actions.” Construct rules that stereotype, entrap, enforce professionalism and decorum to a harmful extent.
Sometimes they know it's bad, but wash their hands of it. It's bureaucracy, “nothing I can do” — sometimes they're right, othertimes that's a lie.
The school's a rotting and dangerous system.
Foucalt compares prisons to schools philosophically. This reflects in empirical data, a phenomenon called school to prison pipeline. Like law enforcement, school staff disproportionately punish minorities and disadvantaged people. Their biases are the same.
The data from punishments of cops and teachers are similar. And I believe, for the individuals punished in schools, experience of detentions in school then criminalization by law enforcement, is causal. Children punished unfairly, provoked and punished for defending themselves, are more likely criminalized. These are kids used to unfair accusations. They are victim to stereotype threat, turn to “criminal” behaviors with others who accept them, learn means to defend themselves, and/or illegitimately gain access to what is denied them as punishment. They have to live with double standards which causes resentment. Many of these crimes will be victimless. But at worst, they become cold people who don't feel warmth unless they burn something.
And when I'm trying to touch on this in short, simple, reductive, hopefully nice ways, in public— I made hurtful mistakes.
We understand that when we talk about cops, all cops are bastards. When we talk about white privilege, we mean all who are white have privilege. Every white person's tempted to become bastards with that privilege. But it's not all white people are bastards like it is all cops.
Being white is not a choice, being a cop is a choice. He knows this, about racism. Not all white people are bastards, but it's easier for them to become bastards. Likewise, patriarchy doesn't mean all men are abusers. It means it's easier for them to become abusive. There are structures that enable them to get away with it. This doesn't mean everyone who can chooses to use them. (But most people learn micro-aggression, which must be unlearned.)
School to prison pipeline... is somewhat closer for teachers in culpability than being a man or being white. Like a cop, teaching is a job one can take or leave.
BUT IT IS ALL COPS. The reason why cops are all, it's actually quite hard to explain. I get why it troubles moderates to say all, because in most groups it's so rarely all, even when it is most. It's different for cops who are a military against their own people. They are never drafted, they always choose. That's why being a cop is choosing to take one side of a battle line drawn.
Teaching is a more necessary and benevolent profession in its ideal. They aren't military, and hopefully will not become it. (although extremists provoke, perhaps trying to make that happen.) Therefore, that choice of profession isn't a battle line. However, the collaboration of some schools with cops is foreboding. That line approaches us. It arrives when cops are posted in schools.
So it troubles me when I wonder how teachers can cope in such an abusive system. This teacher returns to staff the system he admits still gives him nightmares. This year, posts remind me, how my teachers yelled at kids who for some reason aren't supposed to be socializing while standing idle in a line.
I think other teachers are trying their best but responding poorly to the power struggle. These kids who have wounds of unfair treatment learn to be aggressive. This wounds a new teacher immediately. I think the major shortage shows that teachers mostly don't cope, they leave.
I just teachers are sort of... middle managers, maybe. Either benevolent or tyrannical, the manager and teacher both must control subordinates. It's just naturally an opportunistic position for petty tyrants.
Basically any kind of caring profession subjects us to accumulated apathy and bias. It's not that they're all just as much bastards as cops. It's the self-reproducing system producing a population that surveils itself and others. It provokes us to punish others, kinda doing part of the cop job for them.
I imagine the hope is maybe something like, a teacher punishes children for being loud. If their obedience is reinforced many times, they're trained to avoid a loud party, which would attract cops. (If they have that control over their environment.) This is protective as it is cruel.
These control operations are a replicating system. In the traditional nuclear family structure, this looks like: Boss yells at Dad, Dad takes it out on Mom. Mom passes this shit onto their kid, and sometimes uses Dad for “bad cop” as in, “just wait until your father gets home.” Kids bully their siblings and finally, the pets/animals are the bottom of the hierarchy. All this rage and unfair treatment ripples from families, to schools, jobs, governments. Teachers are just at nasty intersection of those ripples.
Of course you don't want to be lumped in. But lump uses you!
I hope this makes sense, I really don't want the cop/teacher comparison to stand unexplained.