EDUCATION.

Draft January 2022.

0. Intro.

The following is about education in schools. By schools I mean educational institutions where students up to the age of about 18 are taught things. I use my own experiences as examples. (Experience of education in Britain in the late 20th century.) These experiences are many years old but I don’t think things have changed very much since then.

The full post below (starting from 1.) is too long and muddled. But here is an outline of the questions it is all about.

Clever learners get more/better teaching, but if they are so clever surely they need less teaching than everyone else. - There are different teachers for, example, maths and physics. But surely one teacher is capable enough to know the material on both of these. - What’s the difference between attending lessons on a subject and just reading a book about it? - If you can teach somebody to be better at learning things for themselves and to teach them to want to learn that would be better (certainly more efficient) than teaching them the material. - Do learners learn in different ways. If so then classroom teaching will be inefficient because classroom teaching is one person at the front teaching everyone in the same way.

1. Streaming and selection.

1.1

In schools cleverer students often get different teachers. (This is what selection in education is all about.) But what is the reason for this? Is it something like the following. There will be some ‘difficult to understand’ course material that only the cleverer students will be clever enough to understand and so arrangements need to be made whereby they, and only they, are taught this material.

For example suppose Mary and Jack are both in class 1 where they are taught physics. But then the school realises that Mary is cleverer than Jack and she will be able to understand physics modules 1 to 40 (where a higher number indicates more difficult to understand material) whereas Jack will only be able to understand modules 1 to 30. So the school decide to teach Mary the 10 harder to understand modules and they send her (and others like her) to a different class, class 2. If not to a different school entirely. Whereas Jack remains in class 1.

But why can’t the teacher 1 (the teacher of class 1) teach Mary the extra modules? What’s the difference between teacher 1 and teacher 2 (the teacher of class 2)? Is it that only teacher 2 knows the material in modules 31 to 40. That can’t be true. I assume that both teachers have been to University and studied Physics to degree level. And so will know as much as each other. In general, a school teacher of any subject will always know a quantity of material greater than (and material which is of more difficulty than) the quantity of material that they are teaching to their classes.

So then maybe the difference between teacher 1 and teacher 2 is that teacher 2 is a better teacher in the sense that they are better at getting learners to understand things. And this greater ability is needed because they will be teaching the more difficult material in modules 31 to 40. But I don’t think that’s true either. You don’t need teachers who are better at explaining things just because what they are explaining is more difficult for learners to understand. In general: I don’t think it’s true that something that is more difficult for a learner to understand is therefore also more difficult for a teacher to explain and teach. I mean apart from the fact that the learner will find it more difficult to understand.

In other words: if there was someone whose job was to teach. Then it must be true that they are able to teach anything that they know. They couldn’t say: “Yes I know this but I can’t teach you it”.

So that can’t be what the difference between teacher 1 and teacher 2 is. In fact, if anything, it would be the other way around. Teachers that are better at getting learners to understand things would be what Jack needs, not Mary. So it’s not the cleverest learners but the least cleverest that need the best teachers. (Like it’s the people with the most serious injuries who need the best surgeons.) If teacher 2 is better than teacher 1 at explaining things then Jack should get teacher 2 because that teacher will be able to get Jack to understand modules 31 to 40. Whereas Mary will be more likely able to understand the same with being taught by teacher 1.

I think that, in practice, the real reason Mary is being sent to a different class is simply because the school need to teach her 40 modules and class 1 are only doing 30. So Mary needs to be taught things at a faster rate. So Mary gets a different teacher. So this ‘different’ does not mean that teacher 2 has some teaching quality that teacher 1 doesn’t have. It just means ‘different’ in the literal sense of not the same. They could have switched round, teacher 1 and teacher 2. That would have worked just as well. Note that the requirement of different teachers is then just a consequence of the fact that the standard educational format is classroom based. In other words a format that involves teaching a large group of learners in a classroom at the same rate for all learners. Any learners in the class who learn at a different rate (whether slower or faster) then need arrangements to be made for them. Such as giving cleverer students different teachers. (Whether or not such arrangements are actually made is a different matter.)

So the question of this section is: “why do cleverer school students get different teachers?”. Which then became: “why do students who need to be taught more difficult material need different teachers?”. A more general version of this question is: “why do school students need different teachers for different subjects?”. For example they will have three different teachers for physics and history and French. Despite the fact that, quite likely, given the fact that we are talking about a quite basic level, those three teachers will know as much as each other. The teacher of physics will know as much French and history as the teachers of those subjects. And if they don’t then, given that they are someone with an undergraduate degree in Physics, they will be perfectly capable of learning enough French to teach it to children.

1.2

Some schools select their student intake using entrance exams and then they also boast about having better final outcome results. But isn’t this (obviously) cheating? Because they are selecting the students that are easier to teach. And who will therefore get the best results. On the basis of their better results these schools also justify charging more money from their customers (parents). They will often also waive the fees of cleverer students with poor parents in order to maintain their results performance in order to attract the clients who can pay.

Not all schools (secondary education) are expensive and selective as described above. But all universities (higher education) are. And the top universities (for example Oxbridge in England) more so. Isn’t this inconsistent? People who oppose selection in secondary education don’t normally oppose it in higher education.

The expense of education causes social immobility. Suppose you need a lot of money to learn X. And knowing how to do X means you will earn a lot of money. (X here might be something like being a doctor or a lawyer, professions which are traditionally well-paid.) If knowing X was the main or only way of being wealthy then the group of people who know how to do X becomes a closed group and the only people who know how to do X will be people who have inherited the wealth of other people (their parents) where the wealth of those people came from knowing how to do X. To stop this kind of thing happening you could stop it costing a lot of money to learn how to do X. (Maybe this would need to go with making it so that knowing how to do X didn’t mean that you would earn a lot of money.) Or stop people inheriting wealth (education).

Of course education can result in a closed group without the mediation of money. So people who know how to do X could promote (informal) practices and enforce (formal) rules about who can learn how to do X and/or who can exercise that knowledge lawfully. (Suppose there was a school of medicine and a committee decided admissions based on their own prejudices and there was a law which prevented anyone from practicing as a doctor unless they had a qualification from this school.)

In general: if you have certain valuable skills it will be in your interest to prevent large numbers of others acquiring those skills.

On this point I should add though that this seems counter-productive. So suppose I was a member of a group who earned money by doing things that needed learning. Then we would want to restrict learning. If lots of people learn then they are competition for us. But this is counter-productive. Because we rely on others. Surely in the long run the more people who have learning the better. I mean learning things that are useful. Like doctors, mechanics, producers of stuff generally.

2. Cleverness.

(Note that I could use the word ‘smart’ instead of ‘clever’. Either will do as an informal word for what we might otherwise call ‘intelligence’.)

How do we know that some learner is not clever? It can’t just be that they aren’t learning as fast as other learners. Suppose that after some lesson Mary hasn’t learnt the content of that lesson. It might just be because her teacher isn’t a good enough teacher rather than that Mary is not clever enough. Maybe it’s the teacher and not Mary who ought to be trying harder.

(Whenever I fail to understand something that I am reading I think: what if it’s not me being bad at understanding but instead it’s just that this text is really badly written. But how can I tell?)

What is the difference between a clever learner and one who’s not. When a learner gets told some material that needs to be understood then their mind engages in some activity in order to get to an understanding of it. A clever learner is better at that activity. As to what that activity is exactly see my other blog post about intelligence.

All this seems to be based on the idea that individuals have capacity or potential or aptitude. Suppose that Jack and Mary are at school and the staff decide that Jack has potential but Mary does not. So he goes to the next Academy and she does not. The idea being that she doesn’t have the capacity to learn the material they teach at the Academy. But isn’t the point of education to increase a student’s capacity rather than just fill it? If we say to Mary: “you can’t go to that school because you’re not clever enough” she might reply: “but isn’t it the job of that school to make me clever?”.

The term ‘aptitude’ often used. I remember that this word was included on our school reports at the end of the term or year. So the conclusion might be that Mary has no aptitude to this subject. But then, again, why don’t you give her that aptitude? Isn’t that the point of going to school?

I always find it a bit odd that teachers are pleased with clever students. Such students make teachers really happy and the teachers call them ‘good students’. So in the above example Mary is a good student and Jack is a bad student. (And sometimes teachers get angry at bad students!) The use of the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ here doesn’t seem quite right. Maybe really it’s just teachers being lazy. Mary is a good student because teaching her is an easier job than teaching Jack.

Does it matter how clever someone is? Where cleverness is about rate at which you learn things. A less clever person will still get to the same end point. Does it matter if they took longer to get there?

What if it was the case that everyone was as clever as each other and the only reason for people not learning X was because of being told that they weren’t clever enough?

3. Teaching.

What is teaching? Teaching isn’t the same as telling. If Jack tells Mary that the name of the capital city of Japan is ‘Tokyo’ then that’s not a case of him ‘teaching’ her that fact. Teaching has to be some activity less straightforward than just telling. For example if Jack explains to Mary how electricity works. And she doesn’t understand. And Jack then has to do something more to get her to understand. Whatever that something more is, that’s what teaching is.

This teaching activity corresponds to the mental activity done by the learner (as mentioned at end of §2 above) when they are trying to understand something.

Based on my experience of being at school my overwhelming impression of teaching was that it was a teacher standing at the front of the class and speaking out the lesson content. And then, say (depending on the quality of the delivery) about 60% of the class understand and the other 40% don’t. Then things would pretty much just end there. There wasn’t very much teaching activity. It was a bit like just throwing some beads at some cups. Some of the cups will get beads in them. And some won’t. And that’s that.

I don’t doubt that the teachers understood and loved the material they were teaching. But there didn’t seem to have been any attention paid to the manner in which they might get that material into our heads. It was like they were flinging knowledge at us in a wild, erratic, haphazard way. Like they were tipping books over heads while yelling: “you want knowledge do you?! well we got knowledge, here you go”.

Teaching isn’t like pouring fluid into a vessel. There’s more to it than that. But nobody knows what that ‘more’ is. For a long time violence or the threat of it was an essential part of this ‘more’. (Like the poet’s paraphrase of the Bible verse: “spare the rod and spoil the child”.)

The teaching needed by the 40% who don’t understand needs to be done individually with each of those learners. Because, while there’s only one way of correctly understanding something, there are lots of different ways of failing to understand. Each of which will be unique to each learner.

Teaching has to be somehow customised to each learner. (Rather like if I was fitting plugs into sockets but each socket was different so I need to make sure each plug is customised to fit.)

Often teachers would put the ball in the learner’s court. By saying: “If you don’t understand then ask me.” But that’s no way of delivering a service. If you are delivering a service for somebody it is part of your job to make sure it has been done right. You don't just do something and then put the onus on the receiver of the service to let you know if you have not done it right. One thing is: a student might think they understand but they don’t. And in such a case they won’t ask.

Sometimes the teacher will ask of the ones who didn’t understand: “well what is it you don’t understand?”. But that’s not a good question to ask! If a learner was clever enough to be able analyse their own not-understanding and understand the nature of it then they would be clever enough to understand whatever it was that they didn’t. I often thought to myself: wouldn’t it be good if you had a proper teacher which would be one that could ask a student’s question as well as answer it. Because students often don’t know how to ask or what to ask. A learner will often just know that they don't understand but not know what they don't understand. Certainly they won't be able to articulate what they don't understand! Like you might know something is missing off your mantelpiece but you don't know what.

Instead of teaching learners things teachers should teach them to be good at understanding things. They should try to get the 40% in the example above to be like the 60% who didn’t need any extra teaching to understand. Rather like that old saying about the fisherman: give a man a fish and he’ll be fed for a day, teach him how to fish and he’ll be fed for a lifetime. Suppose Mary wants Jack (who can't read) to know what is written in a daily newspaper. She could go to his house every day and read it to him. But it would be more efficient for her to teach him how to read. Even though that's a harder task. In the short term it's easier for her to just go and read to him but in the long-term it's obviously better for her to teach him to read for himself.

More generally: it's not just the skill of being able to read that will make someone into a good learner. It's other things which are not as obvious. For example: stable motivation to learn (more on this later, see section 6 below). Or the ability to concentrate.

Similarly: instead of being people who have learned (ie who understand) lots of things teachers should be people who are good at teaching, ie at getting others to understand things. If I want to learn physics it seems natural for me to look for the person who is the best at physics, ie the one who understands the most physics. But actually I should be looking for the person who is the best at explaining physics (or anything else for that matter) to others. Which isn't the same as being the best at physics.

In fact I'd say that the better someone is at physics the worse they will be at teaching it to others. The more advanced their understanding the less they will be capable of mentally traversing the backwards distance to the mind state of someone who is ignorant. Which they would need to do if they were going to be a good teacher. The more natural and easy and implicit your understanding is, then the less able you will be to explicitly articulate it.

What can be got from teachers that can't be got from reading? Say you don't understand something then a teacher will know exactly what you need to be told to understand. Because they know what it is that you don't know, but you don't know what this is and so you will waste time reading through whole books until you get to what you need. You will be kind of doing it by trial and error while a teacher just knows.

Having said that, a well-written book should be good enough not to send readers down a path where they find themselves in the sort of not-understanding situation which requires the intervention of a teacher.

So, my final view on this matter seems to be that I don't at all understand why you would need a teacher. Why have a teacher 'teach' you material when you can just read a book. If you can't do it from the latter then that doesn't mean you need a teacher. It just means that the book isn't good enough. Find a better book.

In response to which you might think (as I have mentioned above) that each person learns in an individual way but books are "one size fits all". Which is why you need teachers. But, again, if a book is written well enough then it doesn't matter that people learn differently. Also I'm not sure there is very much variation in 'learning style'. If someone is learning, say, the laws of physics, then what scope is there for differing styles here?

And if you find a better book and you still don’t understand and so then need a teacher to explain it to you. Then maybe the conclusion then is that you’re just not any good at understanding. Getting a teacher won’t solve that problem.

In the preceding there I am being unclear about whether teaching needs to deal with learners as individuals or not. (Whether or not there is such a thing as different learning styles.) I would say it mostly doesn’t but to the extent that it does then that is essential. So yes, a learner should be able to learn by just (for example) reading, which is a standard non-individualised mass process. But the process by which a learner acquires the skill of learning from reading will need to be individualised to the learner.

4. Classroom logistics.

In classroom teaching it’s as if a teacher is doing something in bulk which should really be done on a case by case basis. Rather like if you were making clothes for different individuals you wouldn’t use a machine that cut large quantities of identical shaped and sized fabric. Because each person is of a different shape and size and so you need to cut each person’s piece of fabric separately.

Teaching really needs individual attention. (Because otherwise, as explained above, it’s probably not teaching but just telling.) But you can’t do this in a classroom. Suppose Jack was explaining some long complicated thing to Mary not in a classroom but in a one to one teaching situation. Mary could interrupt at the exact point where she failed to understand something Jack said and he could correct that part of her understanding. But if she was in a class of 20 then this would be impractical. For one thing it would mean that the 19 other members of the class who did not have the problem Mary had would be just waiting while Jack finished explaining to her.

Often a teacher will act as if the relation between them and the class was like that between a teacher and a single learner.

For example, a teacher will explain something and then ask the class: “so do you all understand?”. And when most of the class answer (in a collective murmur) “yes” the teacher will be satisfied with that. As if that answer had come from the class as an individual. Many of the learners who don’t understand will remain silent rather than saying “no”. Because the situation is not exactly conducive to students being honest in this regard! If one student says that they don’t understand they can become the centre of negative attention from the rest of the class who do understand.

A similar situation is where the teacher asks the class for an answer to a question. So the teacher might ask “what’s 32 multiplied by 11?”. Asking a learner questions like this is, in principle a good idea. It is a way for both the teacher and the learner to see if the learner can think through to get to the answer themselves. But it fails in a classroom situation. The cleverest shouts out the answer (“352”) first and thus the slower learners are deprived of the opportunity to think through to the answer. And they are the ones who need to do that the most! This sort of question and answer process is really only suited to a one to one learning situation.

What the slower learners are losing out here on is exercising the mental faculties. It’s the difference between, on the one hand, recalling something from your own memory and, on the other hand, just doing an internet search. (The difference between forcing yourself to bring to mind that synonym you are searching for and just looking it up in a Thesaurus.) Fortunately these days it doesn’t matter if a slower learner misses out on this in a classroom because interactive software can perform the same function.

When asking questions a teacher will ask only a few random individual learners in the class. (It would be impractical to ask them all.) But then it seems as if the teacher is somehow treating the response and performance of those few as representative of the whole class. When I was in classrooms like this I would think: hey, you didn’t ask me! (At the same time I was kind of glad that they didn’t ask me.)

The other thing about the technique of asking learners questions is that teachers often misapply it. And then it comes across as just the teacher asking questions that only they know the answers to. So in a science class on earthquakes a teacher will ask “does anybody how earthquakes happen?”. Obviously nobody knows, because that’s what the class is for!  But doing this asking first seems to be a kind of technique some teachers use. And a learner might respond: “why are you asking us? we don’t know the answer! that’s what this class is for!”.

(Aside. At other times I think that the reason teachers do this kind of strange initial questioning is because they were told to do that as part of something that Plato said. (I think in ‘Meno’.) Some kind of idea that teaching is “drawing out knowledge” from a learner rather than “putting knowledge into” a learner. This might work with non-empirical knowledge like maths. But it’s clearly not appropriate for empirical knowledge like science. And Plato was more interested in the former than the latter!)

In general the whole set-up struck me as rather disorganised. It didn't look like anybody had given it very much attention. If we didn't understand something we would have to put our hand up to ask a teacher to come round. Sometimes the lesson ended and the teacher hadn't got round to getting to you. There seemed to be no plan for making sure everybody got the attention they needed. Also: what if you still didn't understand after the teacher had been round to explain? What was the plan then?

I have said above that teaching really needs the teacher to give individual attention to the learner. But then I think: but why is that? If the teacher is saying something then it should be understandable by anybody who has the ability to understand and who is paying the required amount of attention. Why would the teacher need to say what they are saying in a different way for each learner? Similarly: teachers say people can ask questions if they don't understand something. So this is something either in the classroom lecture the teacher gave or that the student read in a text-book. But there shouldn't be any questions. If a student doesn't understand and has to ask then something has gone wrong with the classroom lecture or the text in the text-book.

5. How Learning Works.

To be good at teaching it would be useful to have an understanding of how learning works. But (re §3 above) much teaching that I have experienced seems to assume that teaching is just straightforward telling and that the corresponding learning is also a straightforward process maybe like a vessel simply being filled with water.

But actually teaching is where the mind of the learner is somehow active in the processing of the material to be learnt. And learning happens when the learner’s mind is successful in the doing of that activity. Where that mental activity is broadly speaking, understanding the material and remembering it.

When I was at school I used to think that we should also be paying attention to the more psychological processes involved in learning. So, if I was having problems understanding something about physics, a teacher should investigate my psychological process of understanding to see where the problem was. But this never happened. I could ask for help with understanding some particular things. And a teacher might try to get me to understand. (Although this was usually just by repeating what they had already said which was pointless.) But the real problem was understanding things in general. And there was no attempt to teach the abstract skill of understanding difficult things. There was some things called ‘study skills’ but this was largely about using mnemonics for memory and writing notes with different coloured pencils.

Suppose a teacher gives a ten minute classroom presentation explaining how to create a particular sort of document using some software on a computer. The teacher shows the learners all the steps of the instructions on a big screen at the front of the class. Let’s say the process is quite involved and that there are about 20 different steps. This is too much to instantly remember and so it would not be true to say that, once the class has ended, the learners then understand how to create the document. They wouldn’t be able to just go away and create their own documents straight away.

The learners would first need to go through the instructions again probably more than once. And they would need to try to follow the instructions themselves to see if they could successfully produce the document according to those instructions. Maybe try and get it wrong a few times before they get it right. To do both these things the learner would need a written copy of the instructions. Neither of these two things can by done by a learner based on just the verbal classroom presentation of the material. This latter is therefore pretty redundant in the learning process. And yet, by giving the presentation, the teacher kind of assumes that it constitutes them teaching (and the learners’ learning) that material. 

If you wanted to know how to assemble some flat-pack furniture you wouldn’t go to a presentation by someone who did a demonstration assembly in front of you. You would rather just obtain a copy of whatever instruction leaflet came with the product. And then follow the instructions on that leaflet.

And, of course, some things can only be learnt by doing them. By which I mean trying to do them and failing a few times at first. For example, you can’t learn how to juggle just from watching someone else doing it.

Suppose Jack is visiting Mary’s town and she shows him how to get from the train station to the museum. It’s not a very short journey, it’s about 15 minutes with quite a few turnings. At the end she says: “now you know how to get to the museum from the station”. But Jack would say no he doesn’t know yet. He’d need to be shown maybe two or three times more. And maybe also try it himself and get lost a few times.

Suppose Mary told Jack the name of the 14th President of the USA. And then she said: now you know the name of the 14th President. That wouldn’t be right because it assumes Jack will remember that fact. But if he has no need to know it then he won’t remember. What if Mary told Jack the names of all the US Presidents and he memorised them and then later the same day he sat a test and passed and got a certificate saying: Jack knows the names of all the US Presidents. But Jack has no need for (or intention to use) this information again ever. So it’s not right to say that he knows it.

If, a month later, somebody asked Jack a question about the name of a US President he would probably not know the answer. The certificate he got would no longer be accurate. When we say someone knows something this means that the knowledge is persistent and reliable over a longer period than a few days.

Most educational courses are quite long so it’s probably not even true that you know the course material for the duration of that course. If the course lasts a couple of years then near the end you won’t really know the stuff you learnt at the start. You will need to refresh your memory in order to pass your exams.

This point about memory is odd when applied to reading. So, once I have finished reading a newspaper article, I will not remember everything I read. Say there was a particular sentence which gave the names of the two other people who were with the President when he went to the meeting with the Prime Minister. If you asked me the next week for the names of those people then I wouldn’t remember. Because that wasn’t one of the main points of the meeting. But then why did the newspaper article give the names? Why not just have the main points and not anything else? Leaving out all the details. Don’t tell me anything I’m not going to remember anyway. 

In general you don’t (and you don’t have to) remember everything you read. Suppose Mary tells Jack that she has read “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens. And then Jack says: “OK then what does Mr Guppy have to drink in Chapter 32?”. That wouldn’t make any sense.

Another related point about learning is that it is often not sequential. You learn the outline of something and then the details. I think the ideal course format would be to go over the same material a few times throughout the duration of the course. So if the course was 40 weeks long then the first 4 weeks could be just going over the whole material in a sketchy way. Then 10 weeks going over it in more detail. Then 26 weeks going over it in greater detail.

If it was a physics course the first stage could be just getting an understanding of all the concepts. For example the difference between velocity and acceleration. Or between mass and weight.

6. Motivation.

If you had learners who were good at understanding things for themselves (as described above) you would still need them to also have the motivation to learn things for learning to happen. But how would this be? If you are at school age 14 then what is your motivation to learn about differential calculus? As a teacher the most efficient way to get learning results is to create motivation. But instead of doing this teachers try to teach learners despite the latter obviously having no motivation at all. This makes the job of teaching 100 times more difficult.

If the thing you were trying to teach was useful then it might make sense to teach it despite the learner having no motivation. For example how to brush your teeth and which foods are healthy. But a lot of the things that get taught in schools are useless as well. Such as Shakespeare and the geography of the Australia. I’m not saying that these latter things are not good to know. But it only makes sense to learn about them if you really want to.

In the olden days teachers would punish students for failing to learn. I always thought this showed teachers to be really immature. Like they’d get angry with you if you didn’t understand something straight away. Like a small child throwing a tantrum when they don’t get their way.

Did, at any point, teachers think that hitting learners or shouting at them would make them learn? I suppose they thought it would increase the motivation of the learners to learn. That motivation deriving from the desire to not be punished. A positive version of this would be giving students prizes. But both of these seem to be the wrong kind of motivation. They are both so to speak extrinsic to the thing we want the the student to do. Punishments and prizes don’t really affect a learner’s motivation to learn. They just affect their behaviour.

The other (bizarre) thing about punishments meted out at school is that they often consisted of things that were themselves learning. So a punishment might be having to write an essay. Or do extra sums. This was all part of the general conception of learning, shared by both students and teachers equally, which is that it’s a chore and not something that you could possibly actually want to do. I remember the intense jubilation and relief of students at the end of term. I used to think: this is clearly the wrong attitude, it’s not healthy to hate so much something which you are spending so much time on! If you wanted to improve the results of education then the first thing you’d need to do is get rid of this attitude.

Sometimes people say that a teacher motivated their students because they “made the subject interesting”. But usually the examples are quite superficial. A teacher can make history interesting by throwing in a few jokes. But that doesn’t really increase a student’s interest in history, it just confirms their interest in jokes. In general you can’t “make” some subject interesting which isn’t. And if you think you have done that then most likely all you’ve done is replaced the subject with something else that is interesting.

Also the “made it interesting” seems somewhat sinister. As if they manipulated you into liking something that you wouldn’t have otherwise liked. So the teacher is deciding what courses you are going to pursue.

The other thing people say is that they had a teacher who had a passion for the subject and this inspired the students. I’m not sure that I understand this. Does it mean something like that their enthusiasm was infectious? Also, just because a teacher has a passion for a subject doesn't mean they can communicate the content of the subject very well. Same goes for teachers who are really good at their subject. I’d rather have a teacher who was good at teaching than one who was good at their subject.

The necessity for motivation is just one part of a broader set of non-cognitive requirements for learning to take happen. I mean things like being undistracted. If you are in a class where you are being annoyed by the rowdy (and maybe threatening) behaviour of others then this will be a hindrance to a student learning anything. That student might be really clever and hard-working but with these qualities will lack effect if they are emotionally bothered by their environment.

By the way there is a corresponding emotional requirement on the side of the teaching side. A teacher might be clever and be good at teaching but if the mood and manner in which they relate to the student is negative then their teaching will have no effect. For example if they get angry with students who don't understand quickly. The main quality required by a teacher might well just be: patience.

7. Authority.

The teacher always has authority in a school. But that can be counterproductive. Normally in a customer-provider relationship the customer has the authority. Suppose Mary is the customer of a car repair shop and she is waiting while they do a quick repair to her car. They wouldn’t tell her to sit up straight while she was waiting. Also in this situation Mary would have the freedom to complain if she thought that the repair shop hadn’t done the job well. But, in most educational institutions, a learner (or even their parents) isn’t allowed to criticise their teachers in the same way.

People talk about discipline in schools. And I think discipline about what? A school is a place where people go to receive the service it offers. Similarly they go to: hospitals, supermarkets, cinemas, libraries, sports venues. These places don’t have any serious problems with discipline. Is there a particular problem with schools because the people there are there against their will? (In which case maybe I should have made the comparison with prisons.) Then the solution is to make them want to be there.

8. Practical

At school they taught us woodwork. And the reason for this was that they wanted us to learn to do something practical and not just academic type stuff. But then why not teach us more immediately useful practical things like how to fix a tap or put up wallpaper? I’m more likely to actually need to know these things than to know how to make something out of wood.

Similarly they took me to a zoo to see lions and suchlike animals. But I had never seen native wildlife like hedgehogs or foxes or badgers.

9. Some other things.

Everybody says: you don’t need lots of education to be successful and wealthy and suchlike. But then why is everybody so desperate to get into “the best schools”. To pay vast amounts of money for that?