I sometimes have trouble hearing my own tone, so apologies if I've come across as antagonistic. It seems to me that you are acknowledging the complicated and paradoxical tension of education and freedom and I was trying to respond with my own grapplings on the matter in my own practice.

We may be working from different definitions of authoritarian or tyranny. The worst teaching is authoritarian to the core, but at the same time, a classroom with no authority can be no classroom at all. We have to persuade our students to do things they may not want to do in the moment. We have to critique and judge from a position of authority. And the student too must yield to the authority of the teacher if they are to learn, not because the teacher must be tyrant but because one has to accept that there's stuff you don't know and someone else does. That's 'authority' to me.

Given the structural constraints of our education system - the age-based classroom and subject-centered curriculum and pedagogy and so on - I see no way to divorce teaching from some form of teacher authority. (Over 20 years teaching.) Do I struggle with it? Absolutely.

And my point is not that poor kids need to be told what to do, any more than any other kid needs to be told what to do sometimes. My argument is that poverty enters the classroom in ways that negate learning. I wasn't very clear with this, so let me clarify. Poverty sends kids into your classroom who are still hungry, or afraid, or angry. It sends them in missing significant chunks of education that take place outside school and puts them at a distinct disadvantage to other kids in the room.

And since we as a nation refuse to remedy poverty outside the classroom, or even remedy it in the classrooms that need it most, we tend to resort to the authoritarian tools we do have, repeating the whole circle generation after generation, forcing dependent learning that actually keeps generations yoked to their poverty.

And for all its flaws, the best chance most poor kids have to escape poverty is to yield to their classrooms and teachers.