An authoritarian teacher believes in giving orders .The learners rarely involved in decision making, they are not expected to question anything, but only to do what they are told. The children will never be free in all this circumstances. The teacher is like working with animals which cannot use any initiative in doing tasks set.
The authoritarian teacher 's interest is to get the work done perfectly. The persons in need are the learners ,doing a set piece of work perfectly is secondary to them. What is important is what they learn from the work. Learning is likely to be inhibited if the learners in the classroom are not relaxed,happy and interested in what they
are doing and feel forced to do the task.
An authoritarian teacher imposes mental discipline on the children instead of dealing with the problems which might require mental discipline. It is outdated traditional education concept that learning has to be painful if it is to be of any good. This concept was fostered not for the good of learning ,but to subjugate the children and community members in general so that they submit to oppression as subjects.How can children learn effectively when they are constantly under the state of fear and everything is being imposed upon them?
Rigidness:Some authoritarian teachers are so rigid in methods they use when teaching and learner learn almost nothing. These methods become an end to the means. Take a situation where the teacher stipulates that if a child have lot of mistakes in a composition ,must re-write the whole composition. The goal of the teacher is to make the learner to concentrate on the exercise ,writing neatly and carefully. But what will happen to the learner who keeps making the same mistakes even after make lots of re-writes. Logically continous repetition of the same mistakes will eventually lead to demoralisation. By being rigid to the rules the teacher is likely to
produce are worried learner who might not concentrate on doing class work and fear might spill to overal performance and cause backwardness.
Freedom of expression:Children can best express themselves under a relaxed atmosphere. They need freedom in the learning situations to create ,consult and converse with their peers. Although some critics argued that giving learners freedom to express,consult and converse freely will lead to chaos and lot of noise in the classroom. Rather my advocacy is chaos is hardly to occur in a classroom where learners are given lot of meaningful work to do, after the teacher can give them clear instruction ,guidance and direction to do their work. Total silence believed by authoritarian teachers isn't meaning there is effective learning taking place.
Children's span of attention range from five minutes to about 15 minutes, so it is very short. They are very active .If conditioned to be listeners only,listening will be inhibited and consequently caused backwardness in some of the children.
Authoritarian School Heads:Not only teachers are rigid authorities dealing with school children hold a hot iron rod. The school heads are indirectly affect children's learning in most schools. Indirectly the authoritarian head expects and instist on the teacher to achieve the key results areas,cover the syllabus,given the stipulated work to children in the time allocated. The head is not concerned with the methods of teaching employed,whether learning is effectively or not. The teacher because of easing the pressure from super ordinate ,rushes through every lesson ,without paying much attention to the learners' learning problems .The teacher because of the strict supervision from the head forced to ignore the individual differences in learners . This is likely to cause backwardness in some pupils ,particularly those who need special attention.
The heads may also directly influence as they subscribed to punishment as a way of instilling fear in the school children. Some authoritarian heads believed punishment in as strong tool to establish their firm authority and adopt a fear repect among school children ,not as corrective measure. In some cases punishment like cunning for a petty reasons like fidgeting in class such malicious actions by the head might have a number of consequent effects.
The teacher should be made responsible for class discipline.The head can and may help to enhance the teacher's authority in classroom ,but whatever action is taken to this effect should be necessary . Authoritarian discipline by the head is likely to make the school children feel uneasy and frightened in class. The children are likely to be always on guard lest the head's big eyes fall on them. The children 's attention and concentration in classroom is likely to be disturbed because of fear, to the pupils who come to school with prior fears and uncertainties, such additional stresses can degenerate into severe anxieties which could lead to backwardness.
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