Discipline, Punish, and Humiliate

I had a dream last night that I was taking some sort of oral exams and there was this question that I had to respond to and in the question was a quote and the quote was something like "For most of history, schools have served the primary purpose of disciplining and punishing students..." This is not what the question was, but it is close. And as I was responding to this prompt, it was clear to me--perhaps I had had to take this test before or respond to this prompt before--that I NOW understood the quote better and realized, as I was writing, what I hadn't understood or seen before, in previous attempts to respond to the prompt. What I felt as I was writing was one of those OH! NOW I GET IT! experiences. And as the dream was winding down I somehow made the connection with Don Murray and maybe this is all too forced, but discipline, punish, and humiliate are not words that I would associate with Don and, in fact, my sense is that his pedagogy was designed to work against this very construct and I kept thinking to myself as I was half-awake and half-asleep that I need to read discipline and punish, even though I don't know if the book has ANYTHING to do with schooling, at all. But it felt like, during the dream, there was this feeling like--if I read this book, it will unlock a key on this project, allow me to see something I have been close to seeing for sometime or give me a way of saying what I want to say that I haven't yet discovered. A good deal of this goes back to the article I read a little ways back where Yagelski makes the claim that Don should be thought of in the same light as Paolo Freire (and Peter Elbow)--that his pedagogy was (and still is) "radical to many in the educational establishment." I feel myself coming back to that claim again adn again adn feeling like that is that claim is a beginnign for me to develop and advance a larger argument about Don's pedagogy. And the dream was suggesting to me that I should read Discipline and Punish because if I do, I will have a new language to talk about how to advance that argument.

Dreams...strange things.