Once we understand that meaning perspectives serve as internalized instruments of domination, we can choose unconditional positive regard, compassion, forgiveness, and their shared quality of acceptance, the power of the unconditional, as our best alternative to the dominator model. Paulo Freire wrote that we cannot teach the new way of learning using the old way of teaching.[88] No one gets dominated into liberation. High expectations can help in liberation or not depending on how we choose to use it. We can celebrate people with high expectations, or we can use expectations to club them.
Many us of have faced high expectations as a threat, a complaint, and a demand. When we hear that we have "great potential," it usually gets followed by something that tells us we are failing to live up to that potential. Potential here reads as high expectations. The judgment inherent in this form of expectation tells us that "high expectations" actually mean a standard some authority has set that we have to live up to. The dominator in this case will patiently explain to us that telling us we have potential should encourage us and feel like a compliment. Many people would respond to that phrase with a sense of judgment and failure. They would feel punished. I know I did.
Judgment and failure have no place in the "Yes" of learning. When we say, "Yes" to true high expectations, we say "Yes" to our openness to and support of the ever growing abilities of someone else. We just leave how fast and how far behind. Learning best operates in a field of unconditional positive regard. That includes our compassion for those with whom we work. No one wants to risk failure, and in learning, failure has no place. This also suggests that we treat all of those with whom we work and live with that very sense and act of compassion. In the dominator model, compassion is given to those who deserve compassion. Compassion thereby comes from a judgment on the part of the bestower of that compassion. That's not compassion. Maybe it's charity or pity, but not compassion. Compassion works as an absolute and a universal, or it doesn't work at all. It becomes something else. Learning asks for a compassionate ground to operate fully.
This compassion nurtures and stimulates acceptance, and from that acceptance, high expectations become a statement of belief in the other, in the learner, and an offer of unconditional support in her/his learning no matter how it happens, how fast it happens, or even where it leads.
When I taught in a middle school, a mother came to see me about the child for whom she cared. She asked if I had high expectations for that child. I agreed quite cheerfully that I did. She wondered if her child were too young for such expectations. I felt quite delighted at the question, and now I see that she spoke her concern out of her own feelings of expectations-as-unreachable-demands. Her concern made sense to me, and I responded to her needs as well as her concern about the child. I told her that if I had low expectations, the child would not break through those low expectations, and even if she did, I might not see it because I had already made up my mind when I set her limits. Low expectations will distort people in their idea of learning and their idea about themselves and their learning. I keep my expectations high to make open all the learning space she wants and needs to grow and express her very best as she defines that best. When I accept the best she offers and give that best all the recognition it deserves, high expectations will mean possibilities she can reach and not a threat of failure. No one would ever fail so long as I saw that whatever she/he did, she/he did out of the best she had and the best she could give at the time. She would not fail because she would feel successful at every step she took on her way into and beyond expectations.