Is the Mission of Teaching Authoritarian?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Modern dictionaries define “authoritarian” (which traces back to the French “autoritaire” meaning “imperious”) as something characterized by the unquestioning submission to power. Scholars in education borrowed this term from social psychology, where it was used to analyze types of leadership in terms of how they influence group dynamics. Kurt Lewin (1939) singled out three styles of social group leadership: authoritarian, democratic, and lax. 1 Subsequently, this classification was used in pedagogical textbooks to describe how principals interacted with school faculty. Since the early 1990s, it has for some reason come to characterize the relationships that teachers have with their students, while supplanting the previous (very substantial and natural) classification of styles of pedagogical communication. The purpose of the article is to understand the reasons why these terms evolved in such a strange way, to a situation where traditional pedagogy began to be conceived of as authoritarian and was contrasted to a hypothetical “pedagogy of support.” 2