ABSTRACT
Among young school children we can see a reverence for teachers that soon disappears. Little children leaving home for the first time and coming to school learn that they must trust the teacher to care for their well-being as much as they trust parents. They are guided in this trust by parents who believe that their children can have faith in a teacher's positive intention because they share that faith. If it were not so, they would not be confident that teachers would care for their children wisely. Despite the value of showing respect and regard for teachers, by the time students are teens they will tend to regard teachers as negative authority figures or as outright enemies. It is impossible for education to take place within a context where a discipline-and-punish model frames social relations. When overt hierarchal power dynamics make domination of the weak by the strong acceptable, then students will not respect teachers and vice versa. They may indeed show deference, but the core of this trait is not respect but subordination.
