Rankism and the Well-Earned Disrespect of Some Teachers

In the ancient world, teachers were not respected. “He’s either dead or else he’s teaching somewhere” was a comment made in a comedy fragment about someone missing from a gathering. And Lucian relegated a dethroned king to Hades to sell salt or old boots . . . or to become a teacher.* Making money on the market—teachers were paid a fee for their services—was disparaged. Not until the Judeo-Christian influence did teachers begin to gain respect.

Today, teachers are admired, not just for the service they provide to educate the young, but for their seemingly tireless dedication to long hours of preparation and their equally seemingly tireless patience to answer repetitive questions. Unfortunately, not all teachers return the admiration to their students, colleagues, and administrative assistants, which leads to sniping complaints from outsiders about privilege and long vacations.

The root of this lack of respect is what former Oberlin College president, Robert Fuller, calls rankism or the abuse of rank (1, 2). The disrespect is deserved, for the rankism manifests itself as expressions of power over and taking advantage of those not at the same level of authority. For example, a professor may write an email explaining why an administrative assistant should drop everything and copy his receipts from a recent academic trip. The assistant works for the chair of the department, not the individual faculty, but the professor goes to great length to explain why his time is more valuable than the assistant’s—not in the least noticing that in the time it took him to compose and edit the email he could have copied his own receipts. Such manual labor, apparently, is beneath his dignity, but not that of the “lowly” administrative assistant.

Other forms of condescension by senior faculty include failing so much as to say hello to a part-time instructor or interrupting without apology a conversation between a part-time instructor and the chair of the department, with the part-timer seeing nothing but the interrupter’s back. Political power play is how some might cynically or even approvingly describe the senior professor’s behavior. Childish disingenuousness might be another description. Or the behavior might be characterized as the desperate quest for approval of a defensively frail ego because, as I have written before, the stakes in the academic world are so small.

Rankism toward students is legion. In the absence of corporal punishment, verbal abuse has become the tool of putting students in their places. An “appalling lack of civility” is how Charles Silberman in 1970 described the contempt that teachers and principals exhibit toward their students. Sarcasm, ridicule, and just plain rudeness seem to be the preferred means of pulling rank today, such as sternly telling a ten-year-old that she is still a child until the age of eighteen. This ignores and devalues the intelligence of the ten-year-old who knows well that one does not automatically become an adult by celebrating a birthday; it also ignores and devalues the maturity of the ten-year-old who considers a child to be younger than six. The effect of the rudeness is to deflate developing self-esteem and silence opposition or disagreement.

One of the worst forms of rankism that a teacher can pull is to talk in class negatively about others who are not present to defend themselves. Such behavior is beyond rude and childish. It is unethical. It certainly is none of the students’ business what the teacher thinks about other students, teachers, or administrative assistants. But such behavior does happen in the cocoon-tenured environment of the academic world. The teacher will not be fired, but the students and administrative assistants who are talked about may be harmed. Sometimes, unfortunately, that is even the intent of the negative talk.

Fuller’s campaign against rankism is to establish a new meaning of equality. It does not mean, he says, equality of ability, knowledge, intelligence, or position or rank. It means equality of dignity. It means treating others, regardless of age or rank (or race, gender, nationality, etc.), as human beings. In the military world, a soldier’s general is a commander who treats those under him with care and kindness. A player’s coach exhibits the same toward his athletes. Kindness and respect are what those in authority need to exude toward those in a lower rank. It means being nice.

*Cited in H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, part two, chapter  5.

Why the World Is Not Going to Hell in a Basket

One of the unfortunate diseases of older age is the tendency to pessimism or even cynicism. Nostalgia for the good old days is rampant, with complaints about how the young don’t know what we knew at their age and how they are so ill-mannered and unworldly. When generalized to the political and cultural arenas, Armageddon is said to be imminent. For advocates of capitalism and admirers of Ayn Rand, it sometimes becomes a prediction of a new Dark Age.

I wish to take exception to these dire prophecies and venture an alternative scenario. One argument for the coming Dark Age is the analogy that is drawn between the twentieth and third centuries. The third century AD in the Roman Empire was a century of inflation (1, 2, 3); so was the twentieth century in the modern world, including the United States. In the Roman Empire, it was a century of war, chaotic leadership by ineffective emperors, and collapse of cultural institutions. Similar statements are made about the twentieth century of wars, chaos, weak leadership, and cultural collapse. The third century AD paved the way for the barbarians and ultimate collapse of ancient civilization. Obviously, the cynics conclude, we are headed in the same direction.

The decline of ancient Rome is a fascinating topic. I see the beginning of its end occurring about 150 BC, when Greek slaves were brought to Rome to educate the children of aristocrats. These Greek slaves were influenced mostly by the philosophy of Stoicism, the notion of turning away from the material world, and the Romans fell in love with the view. With Stoicism tapping into what apparently was an existing sense of life among Romans, the path was then prepared for Christianity and its turning-away view. By the fourth century AD, Paulinus of Nola, a Roman senator of great wealth and property simply renounced the material world and retreated to an austere, monastic life. In symbolic, if not actual, form ancient civilization sought refuge in the monastery. Turning away from material civilization is not a characteristic of contemporary culture or philosophy.

In the title essay of her book For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand said that Descartes reintroduced the Witch Doctor into modern philosophy, thus setting up an opposition between the material and spiritual that exists to this day. This opposition gave rise to Kant’s subjectivism and the resurgence of mysticism, which, Rand says, will lead to a new Dark Age.

I disagree with this interpretation. Based on conversations with my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, I would say that Descartes made a valiant effort to bring consciousness down to earth—God being the metaphor of consciousness—and the entire modern and contemporary periods in philosophy have been an attempt to integrate consciousness into the material world and to naturalize it. There has not been a complete success, but this notion is at the root of my interpretation of John Dewey’s epistemology and the comment in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 70) that the rejection of intrinsicism in philosophy began “if only as a glimmer” in the late nineteenth century. Philosophy, I conclude, has been progressing, albeit not always in a straight line.

And viewing historical progress as requiring a straight line is surely a prescription for pessimism and cynicism. The Magna Carta was signed in 1215, but it was another six centuries before the Age of Enlightenment and the American Bill of Rights came into existence. In between there was the Black Death that wiped out as much as half of Europe’s population and the Hundred Years’ War, among other atrocities, yet the spirit to live and better ideas survived throughout that period to give us the world we have today. My notion of optimism derives from taking a very long view of civilization—centuries long. I do not expect life to improve much, if at all, in the next four years of the current presidential administration. I do not expect the current (or previous) administration to be the indicator of the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. I see the twentieth and maybe even the twenty-first centuries to be a blip in the progress of civilization. My optimism in no small part is also aided by a commitment to avoid condemning someone merely for espousing ideas with which I disagree.

Good—meaning rational—ideas win out in the long run. The ancient Greeks suffered a Dark Age from about 1200 to 800 BC. When they obtained the Phoenician alphabet and learned to write, they immediately recorded their entire oral tradition, paving the way for the golden age of Greco-Roman civilization. When moveable type was invented in the fifteenth century, every extant written work that could be found was, within a hundred years, published in permanent form, making education of the masses possible. The current century is proving to be the age of digitization, the aim of which is to make every written work in existence available in electronic form. The advantages of this cannot begin to be imagined.

The twentieth century produced two enormously destructive wars, but they did not silence either Ludwig von Mises or Ayn Rand. Their ideas now flourish—not on the front pages of leading newspapers or on nightly newscasts, but they are making their way through our culture. As I frequently tell my daughter, patience is a virtue. I may not in my lifetime see any significant intellectual change in our culture, and my daughter may not see much of a change either. But barring a meteor strike that wipes out ninety-five percent of all living species—and that assumes the destruction of all paper and electronic literature—the will to live will win out and civilization will continue.