Two Parts to Teaching

AI and the Professor

Photo by Eunice Choi on Unsplash

I suggest that teaching is two quite different activities.  On the one hand teachers make available to students (and often forces students to read) the work of “established” scholars and “approved” writers.  That is, they present the ideas of the mandarin class, the conventional wisdom of their culture. 

Conventional knowledge, widely approved ideas, mainstream versions of “truth,” are the backbone of consensus thinking.  They support the present arrangements of law, status, and economic reward. 

And for that very reason they should be taught.  Each generation should know the content of conventional wisdom, at least in order to “fit in.”   Just as they should be offered the opportunity to evaluate “their heritage” in a critical manner. Such critiques often become the “seeding” of new ideas and successful adaptations to new realities. 

It is, though, a sterile process.  It is education as it has been standardized in our society.  It allows one to be a successful contestant on Jeopardy or a solid citizen at the boss’s social events. 

It is “teaching” in the sense that “research” is “looking it up.”  Artificial Intelligence is good at it.  Wickapedia, or all encyclopedia, is good at it.  It is the specialty of online instruction, the scripted classroom, the approved textbook.  It becomes, in many societies, a government developed and approved curricula.   

The other side of “teaching” is “professing,” the sharing of one’s own experience and the ideas that have emerged from careful analysis and inspired thought.  It illustrates an independent mind at work.  It asks students to engage in a conversation. 

It is deliberately non-orthodox. It is experimental.  At its best it has been the very core of teaching at our top universities.    Schools that employ “professors” are our elite colleges, not only because of their potential to stimulate students, but also because they produce valuable original thinking and ideas.  To a large degree they “teach” their own ideas about their subject field. 

And it is for that reason that many current political forces attack our universities and colleges. They are a risk and a danger to many establishments.

One final comment.  Most teachers, or at least the best, do both.  The integration of conventional knowledge with one’s own insights (even if limited or marginal) is the essence of learning.  An active, aggressive, untamed curiosity about ideas is the human quality most essential to the survival of all societies.  

I think many of you will have ideas about this. You can point out necessary forms of rote learning. A person cannot survive in a culture without “knowing their way” and place. Am I being too dismissive of standard teaching? What do you think?

Continue this conversation with friends. Ask them for their perspective. Is this really why there is so much contention over the place and nature of education in America today?

Subscriptions are free (not an introductory offer). I try twice a week to go a little farther off the beaten path and urge new ways of seeing. Sometimes that makes me radical and others conservative. So many of you are right when you say these blogs are too “bothsided.” But I hope they are “outsided” primarily because they are not between but outside of many of our conventional debates.