Equality of Teacher and Student — a recent high school video shared on the Internet as a case study

I’m sometimes surprised that there are still some people saying teacher is in upper position than student. I am not for this idea and it may be one of the causes of teacher-student violence.

In the past several years, the problem of corporal punishment has been controversial in Japan. Recently, Japan had a case that a student swearing at a teacher and then the teacher took a violent action. A lot of news programs has been talking whether the action of the teacher can be justified or not this time, or whether there was any other better solution for this case. In my viewpoint, I think this case is more related to a deeper level of perception of the relationship between teacher and student.

A lot of people in Japan still think teacher is in a position teaching to student one-sidedly and a student is just a person receiving knowledge. Like this time, the students’ resisting attitude against teacher might have stemmed from the old-fashioned concept. Partly because student disobey teacher might be coming from the following two reasons: showing off the fact that they can refuse teacher who is considered as being in a higher position than student and/or the stress caused by this hierarchical structure. This violent action would less take place if the number of provocative student get lower in the first place.

Since teacher has more knowledge than student, they tend to be obsessed with the stereotype built by what they have learned in the past. However, when we study, we need to question the existing theories. In this respect, teachers have possibility of gaining new perspectives from student. Teaching students can be a opportunity for teachers to rethink the established study from outside of the framework. That is why education is bidirectional process of reestablishing theories.

The obsolete notion of superiority of teacher to student should be taken apart this time. If the number of people share the idea of equality of teacher and student, teachers would respect each student more and communicate with each student in a equal position. I expect that it could be a key point for solution of this issue in a deeper level.