The Student Life

Chapter 2

Defining the role of a teacher

It used to be simple: the teacher was the cop, the lecturer, the source of answers, and the gatekeeper to assets. All rolled into one.

A teacher might be the person who is capable of delivering information. A teacher can be your best source of finding out how to do something or why something works. A teacher can also serve to create a social bond or environment where people will change their attitude, do their best work, and give in new directions. We've all been in environments where competition, social status, or the direct connection with another human being has changed us.

The Internet is making the role of content gatekeeper unimportant. Redundant.Even wasteful.If there's information that can be written down, common digital access now means that justabout anyone can look it up. We don't need a human being standing next to us to lecture us onhow to find the square root of a number or sharpen an axe.

What we do need is someone to encourage us that we want to learn those things, and someone topush us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better.If all the teacher is going to do is read her pre-written notes from a PowerPoint slide to alecture hall of thirty or three hundred, perhaps she should stay home. Not only is this a horrible disrepute to the student, it's a complete waste of the heart and soul of the talented teacher.Teaching is no longer about delivering facts that are unavailable in any other format.

Shouldn't parents do the motivating?

Of course they should. They should have the freedom to not have to work two jobs, they shouldbe aware enough of the changes in society to be focused on a new form of education, and theyshould have the skills and the confidence and the time to teach each child what he needs toknow to succeed in a new age.

But they're not and they don't, I'm not sure I want to trust a hundred million unprofessional teachers to do a world-class job of designing our future. Some parents (like mine) werejust impressively great at this task, serious and focused and generous while they persistently taughtme about what we could accomplish and how to go about it.

I can't think of anything more suspicious and selfish, though, than telling kids who didn't win theparent lottery that they've lost the entire game. Society has the resources and the skill (and thusthe duty) to reset cultural norms and to amplify them through school /colleges. I don't think wemaximize our benefit when we turn every child's education into a first-time home-basedproject.

We can increase each kid's natural inclination to dream, we can teach passion in a newgeneration, and we can give kids the tools to learn more, and faster, in a way that's never beenseen before.And if parents want to lead (or even to help, or merely get out of the way), that's even better.

At the heart of education

When we think about the role of school /colleges, we have to take a minute to understand that we backed

into this corner; we didn't head here with determined.

A hundred and fifty years ago, 1 percent of the population went to the academy. They studiedfor studying's sake. They did philosophy and mathematics and basic science, all as a way tounderstand the universe.

The rest of the world didn't go to school /colleges. You learned something from your parents, perhaps,

or if you were rich, from a tutor.

After the invention of public school /colleges, of course, this all changed. The 1 percent still went to

school /colleges to learn about the universe.And 99 percent of the population went to school /colleges because they were ordered to go to school /colleges.And school /colleges was about basic writing, reading, and arithmetic.For a generation, that's what school /colleges did. It was a direct and focused finishing school /colleges for preindustrialkids.