Juanita D. Price and Carolyn Cutler Osborne
A Note On Genre
The hallmark of the academic paper is the bibliography. The list of references gives the reader the starting points of the ideas within the paper. It also is a sign of the degree to which a writer is an "insider" to the academic world as well as to the particular subject matter in question. References are required by the academic institution; as will become clear in the body of our article, we recognize that we have a choice about how we engage with those requirements.
The work that we have done and the ideas on which our work has been based are of interest to people in the academic institution but were developed outside that setting. The basic set of ideas came about as Juanita was figuring out how to cope with an abusive husband in the days before domestic violence shelters. We have developed and tested these ideas in various settings, including the two domestic violence shelters where we worked and the college classroom in which Carolyn taught. We know that readers will find connections between our work and thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Paulo Friere, Yetta and Ken Goodman, and many other authors. Yet we did not develop our ideas after reading these theorists; we come now to these theorists only after many years of working with our ideas. We have never found any theorist who has developed the same array of ideas that we have or explored the full range of implications that we find in our ideas and theories.
References are like potato chips: one is not enough. And with page limits that require the writing of short papers, we elect to present our ideas in a conceptual article without making overt reference to other thinkers. We recognize that our choice may appear arrogant; yet that is not the spirit in which we make this choice. We hope that readers will engage with our ideas and will consider them in relation to the other ideas they know as well as the experiences they have had.
What is an Institution?
An institution is a collection of individuals among whom certain interactions have been "programmed" in the interest of performing specific tasks. An initial analogy for an institution is the computer chip. Circuits on the chip are set up such that when certain conditions exist, certain electrical circuits are open. When those conditions shift, "gates" open or close and make available a different array of electrical circuits. Electrons flow through the circuits that are open.
The school as an institution has programming, in the form of the curriculum as well as individual teachers' plans. This programming is set up even before the school year begins. Children flow through the program like electrons and as conditions shift, teachers and other adult "gates" shift the circuits through which the children flow.
Of course there are problems with this concept. To begin with, human beings are not electrons or gates; reality is more complex than the computer chip analogy. But beyond that, there are significant problems with our over-reliance on institutions:
• No amount of programming or pre-planning can fully account for or address the needs of the individuals who come into contact with the institution.
• As programmed structures, institutions are inherently amoral. There are no "good" institutions, only individual people trying to do good.
• While institutions are created to perform tasks, they also become self-sustaining; institutional interest is the institution's continued existence.
• Institutions resist change. They are inherently conservative.
• Institutions exist not only as purposely set up by human beings (as in schools, government, social services, and the like) but also as by-products of human habits. The institution as by-product becomes a channel through which oppression takes place.
• Human beings need institutions; however we need to change our approach to them.
Through expanding each of these points, we will show how institutions can influence classrooms and how teachers can minimize that influence.
Accounting for Individuals
In traditional school programming, the principal's office is the alternative path for the student who does not comply with classroom "circuits," for whatever reason. Our current way of doing school in fact requires a certain amount of failure. How can a 4.0 grade average mean anything positive unless there are people with a significantly lower grade point average?
Radical teachers obviously want to get away from this particular scenario. We have discovered that the school program as it currently exists works best for white, upper class children. We find we want to shift the institution so that the program works for non-white and/or economically deprived children as well.
We have created several programming shifts. As an example, we will briefly consider Whole Language--not so much to critique an excellent philosophy, but instead to critique the institutionalization of that philosophy. Whole Language is based on children gaining access to reading and writing in much the same way they gain access to speaking and listening: through working with authentic, meaningful language.
As institutionalized, Whole Language boils down to classroom programming, particularly in the area of writing instruction. Children in a wealthy suburban school system near our city that has adopted many Whole Language practices in its classroom programming, are given choices about their writing; they are no longer doing simple expository writing assignments. Teachers in this institution are trained to work with children's fiction and poetry, as well as non-fiction. In the school system's drive for the level of excellence expected by parents who have bought or rented homes in the area in order to receive the benefits of that school system, the teachers have been sent to many different workshops on how to implement Whole Language in the classroom.
Yet this system could not accommodate the linguistic and social realities of a young student from
What is the difference we are suggesting between the philosophy of Whole Language and its institutionalization? The difference is between what we call Personal Authority and Institutional (or Positional) Authority:
| Institutional Authority | Personal Authority |
| Whole Language is an effective way of teaching which will be reflected in all our classrooms regardless of how you, the teacher, feel about it. | I am aware of Whole Language and I have chosen to adopt this philosophy in my practice of teaching. |
| Here are some Whole Language activities and practices which are to be used in your classroom. | I am finding and creating teaching practices which are congruent with the philosophy that I have developed. |
| Our classrooms should reflect very high standards of education, particularly as determined by various standardized tests, e.g., tests required by the state government. | Assessment is the way in which I find out whether my teaching practices are meeting the linguistic needs of my students and where each student is in relation to linguistic facility. |
Institutionalization creates programs which are carried out by people in positions of authority in those institutions, who may or may not buy into the programs. Since institutional programs cannot predict or account for all interactions between people, institutional programming creates a kind of schizophrenia: in the case of Whole Language certain platitudes are voiced, e.g., that students have choices about what they write, but in fact the writing remains motivated by the institution's assignments rather than by the individual's need to communicate.
Personal Authority is the authority that each individual has over him or herself. Personal authority is based on the self-control that comes from four different kinds of maturity: physical, intellectual, emotional, and ethical. The main interest in using personal authority is the greater good. In order to take action on behalf of the greater good, one has to have the physical maturity to accomplish the action, the intellectual maturity to figure out possibilities for action, the emotional maturity to override one's own selfish desires which might impede taking action on behalf of the greater good, and the ethical maturity to determine which choice would actually be the most beneficial to all involved. Although every human being has the potential to develop personal authority, it is not a kind of maturity or self-control that accrues simply with age. There are some children who use personal authority and there are all too many "adults" who never use it.
While every person will necessarily face situations in which they are under someone else's institutional authority, each person can use personal authority to determine how he or she will respond to the demands of institutional authority. Teachers who use personal authority make ethical choices about when to comply with institutional demands, when to quietly do something different, and when to openly defy unreasonable or harmful institutional requirements. These teachers are advocates for their students. In the classrooms of these teachers, the institution's authority is attenuated. What counts is the teacher's personal authority--and the developing personal authorities of the students.
In the case of personal authority and Whole Language, it does not matter what programming the institution sets for the classroom. A teacher is a person who has decided that the greater good can be accomplished for human beings through the process of teaching children the things they can use in order to make choices about and to create their own lives as adults. Further, the Whole Language teacher has, through the process of exercising personal authority, decided that the greater good can be accomplished through helping students gain literacy using authentic texts and authentic reasons for writing. The Whole Language teacher uses personal authority in every day interactions, assessing what he or she observes in the children in relation to the greater good of literacy, the authenticity of the activities, and the children's own developmental processes.
The crux of the difference between the teacher who relies on institutional authority and the teacher who uses personal authority comes when there is student for whom the programming does not "work," for whatever reason. The institutional authority teacher may respond by ejecting the student from the classroom program, by condemning the student for not fitting into the program, or by requiring the student to change in ways that might be detrimental for that student. The teacher who uses personal authority, in contrast, will assess what is happening to that individual student, and will make attempts to solve the problem in consultation with the student while taking into account the community of people who share the classroom as well as the needs of that individual student. This kind of teacher will not only use personal authority but will help the students use their personal authority to make ethical choices for their own actions.
Institutions and Morality
The old computer adage is: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). The results you get from computer manipulation of information is only as good as the data that goes in. Likewise, institutions are mindless structures. They are a series of rules for interactions in order to get certain kinds of tasks done. For example, the task of the school is education. But if the teachers do not possess knowledge and the students have no curiosity, then education will not take place no matter how many hours teachers stand at the front of the classroom and students sit at their desks.
As mindless entities, institutions possess no morality because the rules for interaction cannot determine the way in which those interactions are carried out. An institution that is set up with rules designed to promote the greater good will fail and will actually oppress if the PEOPLE occupying the positions are intent on undermining the greater good. The corrollary is that an institution designed to do harm will not succeed if the people involved in it are determined to work for greater good. The determining factor of the net result of an institution's existence (in terms of greater good) is the personal authority of the people occupying the positions of the institution. Likewise, people who lack personal authority can subvert the best-intended programming.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s a number of books by teachers who taught in ghetto areas were published. These books brought out the terrible conditions of the schools and the places in which these children were living. They showed, through the example of the teacher-author, that these children were not inherently terrible people and that, in fact, these children could learn and had valuable perspectives to share. Books of this sort have fueled the movement toward authenticity in pedagogy and toward the idea of teaching as a means toward liberation.
These books demonstrate that great good can come from a corrupt institution. But the good of the classrooms represented in the books came from the personal authority of the teachers. These teachers often defied the institutions in which they were working. They defied the institutional attitude about the children in their classrooms, they defied the scarcity of resources in these institutions by bringing in their own resources. They made a choice, in the interest of the greater good, to have a commitment to these children. These books were written in the interest of altering institutions; the books suggest that if we had more equitable distribution of resources for children, for example, then there would be an improvement in education. What we want to say here is that while altering institutions is a laudable goal, what must accompany these alterations is the commitment to place people who use personal authority in the positions of these institutions. It is not enough to change the structure of the institutions, including changing the access to resources.
The other aspect of personal authority in institutions is that positive change can be accomplished by a person who has personal authority but who lacks institutional authority. The institution of racism (which is analyzed below) placed a bus driver in a position of institutional authority over Rosa Parks. Her response reflected personal authority. She did not attack the bus driver. She simply did not do what he said. Her response to his authority set a chain of reactions in motion that led to major changes in the
The same sort of thing can happen in schools, although young children may not have enough self-confidence and wisdom to be able to pull this off. Students make an attempt to change an oppressive school in the movie Dead Poets Society, but because of the egoistic, ineffective leadership of the teacher who incites the students to action, their attempt becomes disastrous.
The teacher of a graduate class in which Carolyn was enrolled many years ago was an oppressive person. The class was on the subject of group counseling and was experiential in nature. This teacher consistently misused his authority to put down people, particularly people who did not conform to his expectations. Carolyn decided that she was not going to accept this perspective any more. She wrote a declaration of independence in which she stated her own perspective and declined to consider the teacher's perspective to have any bearing on herself as a person. She read this declaration of independence out loud to the group.
After the declaration, another student made a statement of support for Carolyn, amplifying Carolyn's concerns. Later, the teacher tried to tell the students to do an activity. The students as a group, without input from Carolyn, decided to change the activity. The teacher retained a modicum of institutional authority (the right to give grades, a right that is itself attenuated by the existence of the university ombudservice) but lost the authority to determine the class's activities. The class's decision reflected personal authority in that the students changed an activity that could have been hurtful into one that accomplished similar goals but without the potential of threat.
Institutions and Interest
People in a given institution derive benefits from the positions they occupy:
• Money--salary, retirement
• Health benefits
• Other "perks"--e.g., travel, use of certain facilities
But even beyond the economic benefits, there are benefits that have a profound psychological effect on some people within institutions:
• Status outside the institution as a result from the position one occupies within the institution.
• Authority--the ability to control others
• A way of thinking--the philosophy of the institution (however imperfectly one grasps it)
• Community--of the people with whom one works.
• Direction, meaning--the sense of having something to do in one's life
• Sense of personal importance because of the institutional position
• Sense of self--the position in the institution becomes a part of one's identification
If the institution disappears, these things disappear in people's lives, to the extent that the institution provides them. This is truly important is among people who lack personal authority.
A person with personal authority possesses the maturity to make choices about many things, including, how to think (philosophy), and where to find community and the meaning and direction of one's own life. This person recognizes that controlling him or herself is the best exercise of authority--and derives little pleasure from controlling others; positions of authority are not inherently rewarding. As a result of personal authority, this person derives a sense of personal importance internally, rather than externally. This person has a sense of self that is independent from any institution in which he or she might hold a position.
A person with personal authority is more or less immune to the more seductive benefits of the institution. But people who lack personal authority may derive their entire sense of self from the institutions of which they are a part. These people place the needs of the institution ahead of the needs of the people the institution is supposed to serve.
The more successful an institution is with seducing its participants with benefits, the longer that institution will remain in existence. It is in the interest of the institution to avoid people with personal authority because those people do not place the institution first. People with personal authority place a mission first that may involve the institution only as long as the institution can be part of the greater good. Thus, the contradiction in institutions that are set up for liberational practices is that unless the people involved in the institution possess personal authority, the institution's interest in self-preservation will limit the liberational activities that take place. Sometimes this self-preservation will actually work against liberation.
Resisting Change
Anyone who has worked with family systems will understand how difficult it is to change institutions. Not only is the concept of the family an institution in American life, but each family develops over time a set of rules about how interactions will proceed. Some subjects become topics of everyday conversation while others are off limits. These rules begin as practices and transmute themselves, with constant use, into prescriptions or requirements.
When a family member must make changes, such as an alcoholic needing to stop drinking, the changes one person makes can have a profound effect on everyone else. When an alcoholic begins to take responsibility for him or herself, the family members who had been taking that responsibility now find themselves out of a "job," the kind of job in which they have wrapped up a sense of identity and/or morality. They, too, must change.
Change is not easy for people to make. It is stressful--and the impetus for change (a shift in context) often is accompanied by additional stress. Ironically, there is more stress on everyone in a family when the alcoholic is newly sober than when he or she was actively using. This stress of change is in addition to the stress of the event which caused the alcoholic to seek treatment. It is even harder to make changes in an institution because the individuals involved may have so much of their psychological well-being based on the status quo operation of the institution. These people may passively or actively undermine the efforts towards change.
To make change effectively requires maturity. It requires the self-control of personal authority: the ability to recognize the desire to stay the same and the emotional maturity to keep that desire from limiting the change. It requires ethical maturity to recognize the greater good that can be accomplished by change and ethical maturity to recognize that one might be required to sacrifice aspects of one's job (or even the existence of one's job) in order to accomplish the greater good. This is very difficult, and it goes far to explain why university administrators in times of budget crunches tend to slash teacher jobs, staff jobs, and student jobs but rarely administrative jobs.
How Institutions Come About
Some institutions are developed as a matter of deliberate choices that people make in order to address a problem or accomplish a task. A grocery store is an institution that is designed to make money for some people and to provide other people with an easy way to obtain food. The grocery store sets up certain interactions between its staff members, with its suppliers, and with its customers, in order to accomplish its two goals.
As alluded to above, some institutions are developed from habit; they are by-products. What begins as a practice--a way of thinking about someone or a group of people, a way of behaving in certain situations--becomes entrenched through repetition. The habit offers something that the person possessing it finds to be beneficial (whether or not that benefit has a connection to the greater good). Along with these benefits, the practice does not result in a protest on the part of others. In fact, other people might not even be aware of the developing habit.
An excellent example of how practice becomes institution is the development of violent relationships. An abusive relationship does not begin with a one person punching another on their first date. Instead it begins with a practice: the abuser has a practice of disrespecting the victim. The victim may not be aware of the extent of the disrespect. Women who are victims often have been socialized to be "nice;" they often ignore the disrespect, hoping it will go away. It doesn't. The disrespect becomes habit through repetition and the level of violence used to control the other person begins to escalate. Eventually the relationship is a full-blown violent institution, complete with scripted interactions between the two (or more, if there are children) people involved.
Racism is an example of an institution that began with a practice and that has become an insidious habit. The first victims of racism probably did not even know they were being disrespected because of the language and culture differences. The habits got firmly established and the violence escalated sufficiently to make this a difficult institution to change.
Institutions such as racism (e.g., sexism, homophobia, fear of poverty) offer pitfalls for people who are interested in liberation. Institutions of this sort are based on an essentializing of individuals based on spurious characteristics which are alleged to belong to a group. Liberational thinkers who, nonetheless, think in terms of THE African-American perspective or THE homeless viewpoint or or THE feminist outlook or THE Jewish stance have been ensnared in the clutches of the Institution as By-Product. Categories are not people. Every human being is bigger than the institutional categories (and they are usually multiple) into which they fall.
The trap is a problem for liberational classrooms. On the one hand, we know that everyone in the classroom needs to be sensitive to many cultures, religions, and ways of being. And we also know that some of these ways of being are fascinating for those outside of a particular group. We also know that children are more interested in reading and writing if the materials they use reflect their own background and experiences.
On the other hand, our language about this becomes essentializing. The essentializing of these institutions maintains a gulf that separates human beings and which can seem insurmountable. These institutions prevent us from coming together sufficiently to effectively address oppression.
Furthermore, once again, what actually happens, in relation to the concept of the greater good, has more to do with the individuals than the positions themselves. People with personal authority can throw off the boundaries established by these institutions. People with personal authority who find themselves in a position of institutional authority in one of these by-product institutions can make choices towards not acting or reacting in the ways prescribed by the institution. People with personal authority who find themselves dealing with someone who has institutional authority of this sort can also make choices that remove the institutional demands on the relationship between the two human beings.
We have had, among liberational thinkers, a tendency to use the structure of the oppressive institutions (by-product institutions) as a way of determining a person's right to speak about oppression or right to take action against oppression. An example comes to us from our work in battered women's shelters. Some organizations we worked with refused to have men on their boards of directors. Yet, we have worked with men who truly were interested in ending domestic violence. And we have also worked with women who were abusive and hurtful.
In relation to the sexist by-product institution, the tendency is to assume that all men (who are in the authority position in this institution) can be defined by this position and that all women (who are not in the authority position in this institution) can be defined by their position. From this assumption, the tendency is to assume that women will be more likely to work against the oppression of sexism--and that men will work for this oppression. Yet this kind of paradigm does not account for the Phyllis Schlafelys of the world--or the many men who have a much more liberational way of thinking about gender than does Mrs. Schlafely.
Institutions: Who Needs 'Em?
Institutions are conveniences. With institutions, we can educate our children, get food on the table, select tomorrow's clothing, and (in theory, at any rate) be reasonably sure that there are not people in our wealthy country who lack food, shelter, or medical care. Even institutions as by products can become initial rallying points for liberational change. Yet we must be aware of what institutions are and how we operate in them. Institutions should be run by human beings who use personal authority; human beings should not be run by institutions. Teachers who use personal authority themselves and who support students' personal authority in the classroom can help students benefit from the convenience of the institution while avoiding the harm that mindless institutional authority can wreak on students.
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