POST-HIERARCHICAL ANALYSIS · 012
When a Teacher No Longer Needs to Be an Authority
A post-hierarchical analysis of Vytautas Toleikis’s conversation “I Don’t Try to Be an Authority to Children—I Want to Be Myself”
Vytautas Toleikis rejects the role of authority assigned to a teacher, but not authority grounded in substance. He chooses authenticity, recognizes that a student can teach the teacher, and warns against confusing popularity with wisdom. This is an important shift. Yet a post-hierarchical break occurs only when mutual learning becomes not merely the disposition of an exceptional teacher, but the knowledge architecture of the entire classroom.
Source: bernardinai.lt/mokytojas-v-toleikis…
An Authority Who Does Not Perform Authority
Bernardinai.lt journalist Vakaris Vingilis’s conversation with essayist, civic activist, and ethics teacher at Vilnius St. Christopher Gymnasium Vytautas Toleikis begins with a question: who can serve as an authority for a young person today? Toleikis does not think authorities have disappeared. Their forms, audiences, and routes to influence have changed. Some young people admire artists and public figures; others look to entertainers or social media personalities.
For Toleikis, authority is connected with moral backbone, civic commitment, creativity, charisma, and the ability to be heard. But he draws a clear distinction between a human authority and an idol. An authority does not have to be a flawless model. On the contrary, recognizing a person’s weaknesses and limitations can dismantle a cult without erasing what is worth learning from that person.
More importantly, Toleikis himself does not seek to become an authority to his students. He wants to be himself because he sees too many masks, pretenses, and efforts to project an image in public life. This is not a teacher’s refusal to educate. It is a refusal to reinforce one’s position by performing a role that demands infallibility and one-way imitation.
Context: The Crisis of Authority Is Also a Crisis of the Information Environment
The conversation takes place in a world where the teacher has long ceased to be a young person’s principal source of information. A phone instantly supplies more facts, images, and interpretations than any one person can encompass. Yet abundant access does not by itself create the ability to distinguish knowledge from a persuasive appearance of knowledge. Visibility, audience management, and repetition can look like evidence of competence.
Toleikis puts the problem sharply: social media confuses authority with popularity, while for some young people the phone begins to resemble a “throne of wisdom.” He also sees a vast gap between young people’s virtual world, the curriculum, and teachers’ values. Schools offer seminars for teachers, yet fail to show systematically what life is actually like for a fourteen-year-old.
The issue, then, is not simply a shortage of good role models. The old mechanism of authority is weakening, while the new mechanism of attention still fails to distinguish competence, moral character, commercial influence, and the ability to manage an audience. The school’s task is not to reclaim an information monopoly, but to teach students how to act in a world where no single center possesses such a monopoly.
What Toleikis’s Position Opens Up
- Authenticity instead of performing authority. A teacher’s influence arises from a genuine relationship, not merely from office and a demand for obedience.
- Mutual learning. Students are not merely objects of education. Toleikis calls them the people who “polish his morality” and accepts their observations as opportunities to correct himself.
- The distinction between authority and idol. We can learn from a person without treating them as infallible or discarding everything because of one weakness.
- Learning beyond one’s own camp. Valuable qualities or decisions can be recognized even in an opponent’s actions without adopting that opponent’s goals.
- A critique of the attention economy. Popularity and charisma may help someone be heard, but prove neither wisdom nor moral reliability.
The Post-Hierarchical Divide: The Relationship Changes, but the Classroom Still Has a Center
The disposition described by Toleikis already disrupts the traditional vertical school. A teacher can be wrong, a student can correct the teacher, and authority is not granted automatically with the position. Even so, the conversation still revolves around an exceptional teacher—authentic, educated, curious, and capable of sustaining a living relationship.
Such a teacher can create a more humane classroom. But the system remains dependent on that teacher’s personality. In one class, students may encounter someone who accepts feedback; in another, someone who treats their position as sufficient proof of being right. Authenticity cannot be mandated by a ministerial order, and charisma cannot become the method of an entire education system.
The teacher does not perform infallible authority, remains himself, learns from students, and helps them recognize human, imperfect authorities.
The quality of learning no longer depends on the personality of one good teacher. An environment is created in which all students develop, evaluate, and test explanations, while the teacher’s competence helps their collective intelligence function.
A teacher ceases to be a hierarchical authority not by becoming friendlier, but when the teacher’s competence is used to activate students’ collective intelligence.
Vytautas Toleikis: The Teacher’s Authority
the teacher is a positional authority
Evolution of Authority
How teacher authority can evolve from positional power into a contribution that helps a classroom think collectively.
Not the Abolition of Authority, but Its Decomposition
Post-hierarchy does not mean that teachers and students know everything equally well or that every opinion has equal epistemic value. Such a false leveling would only strengthen “knowledge by phone”: if everyone is right by default, there is no need to test the source, the argument, or one’s own error.
What changes is not the value of competence, but its relationship to power. In a hierarchical classroom, the teacher’s knowledge, the right to assess, and institutional power are concentrated in one role. In a post-hierarchical classroom, competence appears as a specific contribution: the ability to pose a productive question, offer a trustworthy source, notice a logical gap, connect different ideas, or revise one’s position when better arguments emerge.
One person may therefore be authoritative on history, another on teenage internet culture, and a third in recognizing an ethical conflict. No one receives universal authority over every question. Competence becomes dynamic, topic-specific, and tested in interaction.
The Classroom as an Environment of Collective Inquiry
Toleikis’s desired seminar, “The Virtual World of a Fourteen-Year-Old,” reveals a paradox. Adults want a single expert to explain the world of young people, even though the most accurate and constantly renewing knowledge already exists within the school community—among different students, teachers, and parents. What is missing is not information, but a way to collect it, test it, and turn it into shared knowledge.
In a collective-intelligence environment, students could anonymously formulate what actually captures attention in their information environment, which arguments seem credible, when they have been misled, and what helped them recognize the error. Before submitting a new idea, a participant would evaluate earlier ones, preventing the process from becoming an uncontrolled stream of opinions. The teacher would add historical, ethical, and methodological perspectives, but during evaluation the teacher’s name or position would give an argument no extra weight.
The teacher would not lose a role. The role would change: the teacher would become an architect of the knowledge environment—helping formulate the problem precisely, safeguarding the quality of sources and concepts, identifying missing competencies, and initiating the next cycle of inquiry. Yet the answer would not be born solely in the teacher’s mind and delivered to the class as finished content.
How a Post-Hierarchical Lesson Could Work in Practice
- A problem, not a prepared correct answer. For example: how can we distinguish an authoritative social media figure from someone who is simply skilled at managing attention?
- A shared field of facts and experiences. Students and the teacher contribute cases, sources, and criteria. Personal experience is not diminished, but it is distinguished from a verifiable fact.
- Evaluation before a new proposal. A participant first evaluates ideas already submitted and contributes only when they have a new, clear, non-repetitive addition.
- Accountable anonymity. During evaluation, participants cannot see whether a statement came from the teacher, the class leader, a quiet student, or a guest expert. The system nevertheless accounts for every person’s contribution.
- Trying to identify collective wisdom. An idea is evaluated not according to whether the evaluator personally likes it, but by trying to anticipate how the whole competent group will recognize its value. This weakens the incentive to push one’s status or factional interest.
- A minority insight is not extinguished. An original idea that is not understood early remains in the system, linked to its author, and can be reactivated retrospectively when the group acquires the missing knowledge.
- The teacher helps the class reflect on the result. The teacher does not declare a winner, but examines with the class why some ideas produced resonance, others polarization, and what new question the next cycle requires.
AI Is Neither a New Teacher nor a New Authority
Toleikis’s question about what kind of authority artificial intelligence might become matters precisely because AI speaks with confidence and can create the appearance of wisdom. But linguistic fluency proves neither truth nor moral responsibility. AI does not know as a responsible human being knows: it does not bear the consequences of its advice and has no way of life that could serve as an example.
In a post-hierarchical school, AI can be useful as a generator of questions, counterarguments, explanations, or hypotheses. Its answers must enter the same field of critical evaluation as statements from a teacher, a student, or a textbook. In this way, AI does not take the teacher’s place; it expands the diversity of alternatives that a human group must examine.
The problem is not that a student asks the phone. The problem begins when receiving an answer is confused with knowing, while the school offers no environment in which that answer can be tested collectively.
From a Personal Example to a System That Learns
In Toleikis’s story, a student quietly approaches an exhausted teacher and says that he lost his temper unnecessarily. The teacher accepts the observation, feels ashamed, and corrects himself. It is a living moment of horizontality. But it depends on the student’s courage, the teacher’s openness, and mutual trust.
If this principle were extended institutionally, students could not only correct a teacher personally, but also evaluate teaching methods in a safe environment, propose topics, reveal concepts they have not understood, and jointly explore how to reduce the gap between the curriculum and the world they inhabit. Teachers, in turn, could collectively analyze not the “problematic nature” of individual students, but the factors shaping the learning environment.
Feedback would then cease to be a favor that a good authority agrees to accept. It would become a continuous function of the system. A school would learn not only by transmitting accumulated knowledge to students, but by changing itself in response to what students, teachers, and other participants discover through a shared process.
Conclusion: A Good Teacher Opens the Door, but the System Must Walk Through It
The strength of Vytautas Toleikis’s position lies not in a demonstrative renunciation of authority, but in his ability to separate authority from office, the person from the idol, and teaching from one-way influence. His students can correct their teacher, and the teacher can learn even from people whose goals he opposes. This already reflects a significant post-hierarchical sensitivity.
Society, however, cannot base the future of education on the hope that every classroom will have a teacher like Toleikis. It needs an architecture that enables even a less charismatic teacher to activate students’ capacity to think together and gives every student a real opportunity to contribute to shared knowledge.
Teacher authority is then neither destroyed nor artificially protected. It is decomposed into specific, testable competencies and becomes one source of collective intelligence. The teacher remains important not because he or she stands above others, but because the teacher helps the class become more intelligent than any of its individual members—including the teacher.
Teachers as Architects of Collective Intelligence
An extended audio essay on separating teacher expertise from positional authority and designing a classroom capable of collective inquiry.
Where Does the Post-Hierarchical Extension Begin?
The diagram separates the relational shift already achieved by Toleikis from a further change in the architecture of learning.
Has only the teacher’s disposition changed, or has the classroom’s knowledge architecture changed as well?
A More Humane Hierarchy
The classroom still depends on one good, open, charismatic teacher. Students mainly form relationships with the center.
A Collectively Learning Classroom
Students and teacher develop and evaluate ideas in a shared environment. The teacher becomes the architect of inquiry rather than the owner of the final answer.