Students Are Not Products And Teachers Are Not Social Engineers : NPR

November 5, 2010

Excerpt:

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You’d have to be a fool to send your kids to school to learn what the teacher thinks or believes. So said Augustine, who, like Plato, believed that you can’t teach knowledge by telling. What a good teacher can do is afford his or her pupils an opportunity to learn something, not by telling, but by enabling something to be seen, experienced, learned.

A wise man I know once made the same point but in rather different terms: the job of a good teacher is to put a firecracker up your rear-end and light it. How you respond to that — what you get out of it — that’s up to you.

[...]

Students, like citizens, are free and equal, and they have the power of reason; they can make up their own minds and can discover and enforce their own conceptions of value and truth and meaning. To view them as any less is to view them the way politicians so often view the public, without respect.  

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Students Are Not Products And Teachers Are Not Social Engineers : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR