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As far as perpetrating physical violence, I have not. There are times when I question my personal integrity in my role as special education teacher. In my heart of hearts there is no iron clad work ethic that seems to be the driving force behind many of the things I am expected to do with my students each day.
Being a parent gives this effect. It indeed empowers one over another person. And one has to clearly be fair and its not always easy to be. Eventually there is a pecking order where the child is simply a child and what the parent says go. It doesnt always stay this way but it can morph this way rapidly based on any discrepancies of disagreement especially when there is a dominance issue being challenged from one who is maturing.
I, too, am a teacher. In my undergraduate classes, I always feel as though I am trying to strike a balance – if I am too soft, then students do not complete their assigned tasks or do as well; if I am too tough, I start to feel like a guard in the SPE. One can never go too far in one direction or the other, else we risk getting out of balance. One thing we learn from the SPE is that we need oversight from many different persons with different points of view. It was only when ‘outsiders’ came and had a look at what was going on at Stanford, that Phil Zimbardo realized that he had gone too far and that he needed to stop the experiment. These are two good lessons we can learn form the SPE: always be seeking balance, and always seek out and value different – even opposing – points of view.
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