The Teacher-Learner Relationship

The Problem

14.1 The number of those who believe that all is not well with our
educational institutions has lately increased from a few lonely
pioneers such as Rousseau, Dewey, Neill, Holt, and Goodman, to a
chorus including (at the time of writing) the British Prime Minister
and the Secretary of State for Education and Science. Not so long
ago, critics of compulsory schooling were regarded as a lunatic
fringe. Now, a senior university teacher of education (Richmond,
1975) can truthfully write that 'some of the best minds in the
business now share a sense of profound disillusion with the
established system of education and all it stands for'. Both the
former and the latter groups alike quote Einstein:

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern
methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy
curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from
stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it
goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake
to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be
promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the
contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a
healthy beast of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with
the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously,
even when not hungry, especially if the food handed out under
such coercion were to be selected accordingly.

Side by side with these criticisms of educational institutions,
there continues a firm belief in the value of education in itself,
both to individuals and to the community. This view is also implicit
in most of the present volume, from Chapter 1 onwards ( e.g. Sections
1.11 and 1.12); and especially at the end of Section 10.3:

We can now see how a positive-sum system of relationship of great
value can develop within a community where there is a suitable
balance between the achievement of completely new understanding
the hard way by particular individuals; the building up of
knowledge by learning from those who already know; the exchange
of expertise in many ways; and the raising of our overall level
of general knowledge. These processes together provide a
collective level and extent of knowledge, and thereby potential
for understanding, which is one of the major differences between
advanced and primitive cultures.

So what is wrong, and why? Where lies the discrepancy between
education as we strongly (though perhaps rather vaguely) it should
be, and education (or what goes under that name) as it is? And why?
To the question 'What is wrong?', two answers can be given in
brief. Firstly, the teaching itself is often inefficient. There are
still children who reach secondary schools unable to read, despite
six years of instruction in primary schools. And the teaching of
mathematics is such that many -- probably a majority -- acquire a
lifelong dislike for the subject, together with lack of confidence in
their ability to understand it. These are two of the most important
subject areas. As for the others, how many adults voluntarily
continue to study subjects which they were taught in schools, other
than those necessary for their employment or professions? Secondly,
the system itself is being run with increasing difficulty, as
evidenced by the fact that stress in teachers is now a common topic
for articles in the educational press.
Some answers to the other question 'Why?', will be offered in the
remainder of this chapter (CHAPTER 14), and in the next.


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