Teachers as Predators

Teachers make the best predators because they are already on the inside of the student’s trust. They know how to assume authority, control attention, and evoke compliance – all essential predatory skills.

Predatory teachers use their teaching platform for personal profit at the student’s expense. Instead of attending to the student’s benefit and being mindful of their own integration, such teachers take from the student, sacrificing both the relationship with the student and their own integrity.

These teachers are socially maladapted. That is, their actions not only harm the student but also harm the concentric circles of community and social trust that surround and infuse the teaching relationship, rippling that damage out into the larger society. The resulting problems can affect many people over long spans of time.

Why are students vulnerable to such teachers? Deep study with a teacher echoes our most profound early experiences, in which knowledgeable and powerful entities take critical care of us. Thus even experienced and mature adults can be as vulnerable as children to charismatic and insightful teachers. These teachers can move us, take us off balance, and convince us that they know us better than we know ourselves. This makes it easy for them to manipulate us, to take things that are not in our best interest to give.

What motivates such teachers? Some do not fully realize what they are doing. Some find ways to rationalize, to refuse to see how their actions serve themselves at significant cost to the student.

Many social predators find ways to take repeatedly, not destroying their prey but keeping it alive to feed again and again. Often the student is an active part of this deleterious dynamic, helping to create a symbiotic relationship, an exchange of favors and demands, a mutual knot of obligation and manipulation.

But however complicit the student may be, the teacher, who has the greater influence and power, has primary responsibility to act in the student’s best interest. To teach with integrity.

To protect our students from predators, we must first be able to recognize predation, in others and in ourselves. To understand how we ourselves might walk such a dark path opens our eyes to relevant patterns and gives us useful tools. Excellence in teaching requires us as teachers to become familiar with our darkest sides so that we do not, in ignorance, teach them. So that we neither prey upon our students nor create students who are ready to be preyed upon.

It takes courage and determination to look into our own darkness. As teachers of depth we must look there because what is hidden controls us most completely. Only when we percieve ourselves down to our most unpleasant foundations and can regard our flaws without bias can we be confident that our actions – and the actions of others – are in the student’s best interest.

My offered practice: take a moment of your teaching and student interactions to ask yourself what you might gain if you were both acquisitive and willing to disregard your student’s welfare. Dwell in that imagining for a moment. Next consider what you might do with an opposite intent and a willingness to nurture the student and their learning. Repeat the practice, noticing also your own reaction.