Professors’ fear of losing control blocks any class critique in the classroom

Evidence

Fear of losing control in the classroom often leads individual professors to fall into a conventional teaching pattern wherein power is used destructively. It is this fear that leads to collective professorial investment in bourgeois decorum as a means of maintaining a fixed notion of order, of ensuring that the teacher will have absolute authority. Unfortunately, this fear of losing control shapes and informs the professorial pedagogical process to the extent that it acts a barrier preventing any constructive grappling with issues of class. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 377

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Generating classroom excitement requires abandoning fixed agendas and fixed authority — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 24; Professors can espouse liberatory theory while practicing domination in class; Progressive change is resisted when it unsettles classroom authority and safe harmony — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 73 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Order-obsession and fear of losing face silence dissent in classrooms #corroborates (0.92) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 354
• Learners trained by banking education reflexively defer to the teacher even mid-dialogue #expands (0.78) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 156