Trust Is Not Enough: Classroom Self-disclosure and the Loss of Private Lives

Abstract

The paper presents and critiques some important philosophical and educational arguments that are used to support the practice of personal self-disclosure in the classroom, both in group settings and in the form of autobiographical journals. It argues that there are important reasons for valuing privacy even when self-disclosures occur in an environment of perfect trust and caring; that to understand the importance of privacy primarily in terms of trust, or the absence of trust, is to risk overlooking the less apparent, yet more subtle, threats which ‘sympathy’ and ‘caring’ can pose to self-disclosers.