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                         %STUDENTS' POLITICAL POWER 810317

     Rarely  do  students  in a cooperative group exercise
real   political  power.    Rarely  do  students  say   to
professors who are  telling  students what they must do---
that they,  the students,  would like to have a say in how
the class  is run.    Professors teach students that to be
good  students  they must "make it"  on their own  on  the
basis  of  superior  intellect and  hard  work---with  the
professors writing all the  rules of the game,  serving as
referee, and keeping score.

     Students who accept such professorial definitions  of
the  nature  and  rules of the game of  getting  ahead  in
academe   find  it difficult to  think  assertively  about
creating,  gathering and/or exercising political power  in
their  own best interests, or in the interests of academic
honesty and growth.   According to some professors'  rules
of the game, to turn away from individual ability and hard
work  and  towards the exercise of political power  is  to
cheat  in the academic game.   Only those students who  do
not   deserve  to  get  ahead  will  stoop  to  exercising
political  power  and assert what they regard as  valuable
and most important to students' intellectual and affective
health.    Thus  students  who respect  their  traditional
professors must in a sense declare independence from those
professors   they  respect,   before  they  can  ask   the
professors  to  be  responsive  to  students'   needs  and
interests.

     Higher   education   is  perverted  when   professors
exercise political power in classrooms---in the absence of
the effective exercise  of  political  power  by students.
Dialogue  is  blocked and mistakes are not  revealed  when
there is an imbalance of political power.   The search for
truth  is transformed into the exercise of  authority  and
the recitation  of doctrine.   The  satisfaction of asking
new  questions  is  crowded out by the cataloging  of  old
answers  to  old questions.   The expression  of  personal
feelings   and  insights  becomes  less   important---than
attention  to  the  propriety of forms of  expression  and
language.

     Without  student  political power  education  becomes
authoritarian.
                                                                                                                               
                         (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in      
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