“Empowerment Should Be Collective”: Four “Truth-Tales”

Abstract

We know that a teacher’s job is to teach and a student’s is to learn. The objective of learning is what creates a relationship between the teacher and the student in the context of a classroom. However, in the extract from Suketu Mehta’s book above, we realize that a teacher’s job at Mayur Mahal, a school in Mumbai, is teaching the student, in this case Mehta himself, a lesson in what not to do as a learner, as a student: not to not do your homework, even if that homework was an “exercise in repetition or ‘learning by heart’ or ‘rote-learning.’”1 In other words, a student must do exactly what her teacher tells her to do because when she doesn’t, she must pay for it. The teacher shames the student into regretting an act of rebellion: forgetting to do homework. This is how a teacher exercises her power as a teacher in the relationship—a power that is coercive in that it seeks to discipline the most docile of bodies through a technique of public shaming within the context of a pedagogical institution. Public shaming as a mode of disciplining bodies (not just the one that is to be disciplined but also its spectators) in the institutional space called the school has a striking resemblance to the beheading of a recalcitrant subject as a public spectacle in medieval times. Public beheading was a spectacle precisely because this was how a sovereign performed and also spatialized his power (that being a sovereign meant controlling not only physical territories but also physical bodies, even destroying them in the service of sovereignty).KeywordsPoor WomanEmphasis MineFeminist TechniqueGlobal Knowledge EconomyCharacter SubjectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.