An alternative view, of course, is that children begin school full of desire to learn, but gradually, sometimes even rapidly, lose such desire as a result of their learn ing experiences (Holt 1964). The psychologist and educator William Glasser expressed this poin particularly well in his book Schools Without Failure: ”Very few children come to school failures, none come labelled as failures. It is school and school alone which pins the label of failure on children” (Glasser 1969:26).
It would of course be naive to think that all learners attending classes to learn a new language are there because they want to be. For a host of possible reasons, language teachers might meet some degree of resistance from some of their learners. However, if learners are viewed narrowly as resisters, teachers may well employ methods involving compulsion rather than see king wars of helping them to want to learn the language or to see the value in what they are doing. What we would emphasise here is that the use of force or punishment has never been found to be particularly useful in helping learners to master a language or to foster a lifelong love of languages; far more effective wars exist of helping reluctant learners. We shall take up this point further in later chapters.

Perhaps an even more common conception of learners is one in which they are seen as receptacles to be filled with knowledge. This is sometimes referred to as 'the jugs and mugs' theory. The teacher is seen as having a large jug of knowledge which is poured into the learner 'mugs' or receptacles, which in turn can only accept a certain amount of that knowledge according to the size of the learner's IQ. Here again we can see that instruction and information-giving become the natural way of working for teachers who begin with such assumptions, particularly if they also view intelligence as something which is fixed at birth and immutable. Freire (1970) describes this as the 'banking' conception of education, where learners are like bank accounts into which deposits are regularly made and drawn upon later for specific purposes such as examinations. Thus, if language teachers view their learners as receptacies, with a specific amount of language aptitude which determines their capacitr to absorb language, they will be likely to adopt methods which involve transmission of language items to their learners.

Another common metaphor conceives of learners as raw material, like clay to be moulded into a fine work of art or building material to be constructed into a sol id and well-designed building. There is much to be said in favour of such an approach insofar as most of us remember being influenced by an inspirational teacher, and this view does in fact form a part of social interactionist theories. However, there are also dangers of manipulating learners and shaping them according to the teacher's wishes.
The notion of learner as client places greater emphasis upon the identification of educational need and begins to alter the nature of the relationship between teachers and learners. Much adult foreign language learning begins with such a premise, and this view has been prevalent in teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) for same time. The prospective learners are likely to know what they want to learn and how much time and money they are prepared to invest in doing so, while the role of the teacher can be seen as attempting to meet those needs. Interestingly, while this is a common way of working with fee-paying adults in language schools, it is nevertheless still rare to involve school children in deciding what they need to learn, or in evaluating how helpful they find their lessons to be.