ABSTRACT
Teachers have few ideological scruples about inflicting closure on impertinence, but the way they handle humour may resemble the way they often appear to handle intrusions from world of the pupils' own intellectual concerns. If pupils' constitutive speech about knowledge is seen as somehow valuable but essentially intrusive, the kind of relation that maintains such a definition of knowledge might be described as monologic. Many teachers would find it difficult to agree with the suggestion that their pupils are subjected in learning to a relation that in essentials has the character of monologue. Some attempts to allow pupils to 'work on their own' and devise 'their own' projects seem to have reversed the monologic relation from content controlled by the teacher to content controlled by the pupil. It seems as if it is finally the coercive etiquette of subject languages and their minimal grammars that keep teacher and learner from speaking openly about the things that are in their minds.
