The Classroom: Where Agency Finally Collides With Trust

Nowhere is this crisis more visible—or more emotionally charged—than in education.

Thirty years ago, most parents did not argue with teachers about curriculum. Not because teachers were perfect, but because there was trust. Trust that teachers were trained professionals. Trust that schools existed to educate, not indoctrinate. Trust that authority had been earned.

Today, that trust has eroded.

Parents increasingly insist on instructional control. Curricula are audited, challenged, rewritten in public forums. Teachers are treated not as professionals exercising judgment, but as functionaries whose authority is provisional and constantly under review.

Yet this shift ignores a critical fact: teaching is among the most heavily vetted professions in modern society. Credentialing, praxis exams, continuing education, evaluation—these exist precisely to justify teacher autonomy. Administration, historically, existed not to strip teachers of agency but to protect it while preserving a bounded role for parental input.

A teacher without agency is no longer a teacher. They are a delivery mechanism—an animated syllabus governed by fear.

Student Agency vs Teacher Agency: A False Opposition

Much of the current conflict is framed as a zero-sum struggle: student agency versus teacher authority, parental rights versus professional autonomy. This framing is philosophically incoherent.

Student agency and teacher agency are not opposites. They are complementary forces within a shared project.

Students require agency over engagement, inquiry, interpretation, and effort.

Teachers require agency over curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and classroom governance.

Parents require agency over values, boundaries, and advocacy—not instructional micromanagement.

Administrators require agency to mediate, protect, and structure—not dominate pedagogy.

The state requires agency to ensure equity and standards—not ideological conformity.

Conflict arises not because these roles exist, but because they are collapsing into one another.

Toward a Theory of Situated Agency

Here I propose a framework that may serve as a springboard for further research: Situated Agency Theory.

The central claim is simple but radical:

Agency is not a quantity to be maximized, but a capacity to be situated.

Agency must scale with:

1. Expertise – who knows what they are doing

2. Risk – what is at stake if decisions go wrong

3. Collective consequence – how many others are affected

Too much agency in the wrong domain is as destructive as too little agency in the right one. The modern crisis is not authoritarianism versus freedom, but misallocation.

In education, we have withdrawn agency from those trained to exercise it, while granting it to those structurally unequipped to wield it at scale. The result is neither empowerment nor accountability, but permanent instability.

Conclusion: Trust as the Silent Architecture of Agency

Agency does not function without trust. Trust is the social mechanism by which agency is peacefully transferred. When trust collapses, agency must be seized—and seized agency always looks like power struggle.

A society that demands agency everywhere ends up trusting no one.

A society that trusts no one must govern everything by force.

The question, then, is not whether individuals deserve agency. That much is obvious. The deeper question—the one we have been avoiding—is where agency belongs, when it must be shared, and when it must be surrendered for the sake of something larger than ourselves.

Until we learn to answer that question, our institutions will continue to fracture—not because we value freedom too much, but because we no longer know how to place it.