I should tell you that for most of my life, I have had a somewhat jaundiced view of authority. To me, the respect accorded to it has to be earned, not demanded. Let me succinctly say that in my education career, both as a student and a teacher, there was much authority for which I had little respect. Having been educated in the Catholic school system, I was often both witness to and victim of the abuse of power. Our teachers, both lay and clerical, all too often abused us physically at the slightest provocation; indeed, it was the rare instructor who wasn’t a bully. A few examples will suffice to illustrate: once, when we were eating in the cafeteria, one of the students had the temerity to close a window. Retribution was swift: he was immediately pummeled by a priest who shrieked at him, “Who the hell do you think you are?” After all these years the memory is still vivid, so you can well imagine the impact such use of violence had on us at the time. Another time, in Latin class, a student, perhaps for not knowing the answer, was hauled in front of the class, slapped about and had his shirt ripped. The teacher apologized for ripping the shirt, telling him to ‘send me the bill.’
Never a particularly apt student in the sciences, I was often the victim of both physical and verbal abuse by the physics teacher. He wielded a heavy text frequently slamming it with great vigor and force on my head when I allowed myself to get distracted. Once, when I didn’t know the answer to a question, another student, surreptitiously reading the answer from the text, was told to slow down, because ‘Lorne’s kind of slow.’ Both he and the rest of the class enjoyed his wit, but I frankly failed to see the humour.