With adults (and with kids) my approach would be: We are here to learn X (Y,Z etc.)  I know it, and you don't, so I'll be in charge.  If you don't wish to study, I would rather you didn't come to my lectures...

When Ira Shor hands a certain modicum of power to his students, he recognizes that the teacher-talks, students-listen structure leaves students unprepared for participation in democracy. Shor:

Students come of age without exercising the democratic arts needed to negotiate authority in diverse settings.  Not developing democratic habits, they lack experience in governing public affairs, in taking responsibility for policy-making, in what could be thought of as trying on civic authority for size.  Here is how one of my female students (a 30-year-old white education major who went to technical college in Germany) described her awkwardness when I invited her and others to negotiate a learning contract with me for their final grades: "I feel unease judging the learning contract proposal."(Cassiodorus' note here: see how Shor started the class described above.)  "In the last twenty-five years, nobody ever asked me for my opinion on this topic.  (I certainly complained to my classmates about the structure in the classroom.)"  She had lived in two nations describing themselves as democracies, yet it seems she was never a constituent of her own education, only a recipient of it who complained privately to peers. (32-33)

There's something more going on about education than the delivery of information through lectures.  The "Siberian syndrome" exists because, once again in Shor's words:

... in the face of undemocratic practices, students do assert themselves, informally and subversively, by telling the teacher what they like and don't like, by disrupting class, by resistant nonparticipation (Siberia), by faking interest, by breaking the rules (cheating on tests, buying term papers, copying someone else's homework, reading Cliff's Notes instead of books, by cleverly "playing the angles" to "beat the system" (like manipulating the teacher to get by with a grade or conning an advisor to get into a closed course or for some financial aid), and sometimes by protest actions like walkouts, sit-ins, rallies, marches, newspaper campaigns, petitions, or lawsuits. (32)

Community college teaching in the States, which is what Shor does, isn't about conveying information to willing students.  If the students really wanted to learn stuff, one could easily reason, they would go around the teacher, and figure it out for themselves.  Or they would hire a tutor on an ad hoc basis, which is something different.  Maybe students in an orchestra need a conductor; but a conductor does more than a teacher does, just like a tutor does more than a teacher does.  No, community college teaching in the States (and I say this having done it myself for four years) is about being an appointed "authority figure" in a system where students are accumulating credentials and degrees so they can get better jobs.  It's about being a cog in a machine which is being used, intentionally, to forward corporate domination and student conformity.  Teaching students who actually want to learn stuff is a "cake" job; anyone who really knows the stuff can do it.  This isn't that.  This is an economic machinery, ripe for politically-charged intervention.

And so, in teaching community college, we confront the system.  We can see how well the machineries of corporate domination and student conformity work on a global level, btw, by observing the human race as it dismantles ecosystems around the globe, especially in countries subject to onerous IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs, preparing the ground for an ecological disaster of horrendous proportions.  Welcome to our corporate-dominated world.  

Now, certainly there must be some sort of public outrage against all this, just as there should have been some sort of public outrage in the dystopian world I painted at the beginning of my diary.  Is democracy going to stop the ecosystem-dismantlers before they ruin it all, or for that matter the Bush administration with its drive to dictatorship?  Well, democracy has been shoved into dormancy 'round the world, aided by the co-optation of the so-called "Left" into a "political class."  Kees van der Pijl describes this accurately, if with excessive abstraction.

If we really want to do something about all this, we will have to encourage some home-grown democracy, as exemplified by the antigloblization protesters cited in van der Pijl's article linked above.  One way to do this is by intervention into working-class scenes like, say, community college in the States.  So this is what Ira Shor helps us do.

"Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world" -- John Lennon