For many students, the whole idea of school loomed large in terms of the becoming self or what now has become the forces that make the process one of the not becoming self in the face of the conformity demanded by the social and cultural forces in which we grew up. Our self reaches for individuation. These forces enforce conformity and the surrender of the independent to the status quo. All of this finds its coercive power in the withdrawal of regard for the individual and the constant threat of rejection. As inherently social beings, as we humans are as Aristotle pointed out, we abhor such rejection. Even as we seek liberation from the arbitrary structures of living and behavior that others have constructed, we still desire a relationship with others based on mutual acceptance, or personal regard.
School, for most, is not the place to look for such unconditional positive regard. It doesn't even come in last. Such regard simply forms no part in the scheme of school. School endlessly demands obedience to some standard of its own, and if you don't come up to that standard, you will find yourself trapped inside what the school perceives as your failure. School may call such failure many things. School never seems to exhaust demeaning labels, but at whatever level you reach in the school's standards, it will never be enough for anything but the most conditional kind of regard.
When we enter school, we face a question perhaps unspoken but tangible in every response school has to every effort we make: "How smart are you?" Almost every one of my students, and most people I have ever encountered, don't like this question. In fact, for many who have responded about this question, it hurts. In any question, if not most any utterance, some quality and location of power resides. In this question's configuration, the speaker, the questioner holds all the determinative power. Even as the question is asked, it is answered by the speaker. In that the speaker makes the demand imbedded in the question, it tells you that it holds power and the decisive power over us and our answer. The speaker defines the answer whatever we say.
Students reported over and over that the question itself made them feel exposed and defensive, a reasonable response to a sense of the inevitably demeaning. The question as formed made them feel that the questioner already knew the answer: "Not as smart as I am, no matter how smart you say you are. I'll be the judge of that." In fact, many of them remembered their sense of the question in a slightly different but highly significant way: "How smart do you think you are?" That version simply demands defensiveness on the part of the one questioned. It asks the respondent to confess her/his delusional sense of personal intelligence which the interlocutor will soon expose for what it is. Whatever else students found true about this question, they understood the assumption behind it. The questioner assumes some level of dumb; the question just wants to ferret out just how dumb that respondent is.
This question in one form or another, one specific context or another, forms the basic interaction between school and student. It speaks of school's unconditional negative regard until proven otherwise.