ABSTRACT
To understand what may be involved from the teacher’s perspective, we need to ask why, after some two hundred years of classroom teaching, teachers have not generally engaged in pupil consultation before now. There would seem to be a number of contributory factors. One, certainly, is the ‘ideology of immaturity’ (Grace, 1995) that we mentioned in our opening chapter, according to which children and adolescents have not developed sufficient wisdom to be able to contribute to responsible decision-making about their own lives. Another
important factor has surely been the ideology of professionalism, according to which teachers, especially in the UK, have persuaded themselves – and for many years succeeded in persuading others – that by virtue of their professional positions and expertise, ‘teachers know best’ in relation to all school and educational matters. Both of these seem indeed to be ‘ideologies’ in that they are claims that are much too sweeping to be rationally justifiable and also in that they have seemed to serve the interests of teachers by legitimating their unilateral exercise of power over their pupils.
