What is the purpose of teaching?

The answer to this question in my opinion will depend on the one asking the question.  If it is the student, it will be to learn something new.  If it is a business owner it will be to transfer knowledge of a task or skill.  If it is a teacher, it will be to educate or inspire a student.  But for the philosopher, we see a deeper question. 

Can you really teach?  What does it mean to teach?  What is the act of teaching?  In fact can teaching actually occur without another action?  Most verbs do not require something to occur in someone else for the act to be fullfilled.  If I were to run, I would be running.  If I were to sing I would be singing.  But teaching does not work that way.  I can't acomplish it without someone else.

Now you may argue, "Charlie, many things require two or more people, this is not an exclusive property of teaching."  True, arguing, discussions, fighting, fencing are some that come to mind, but all parties are doing the same thing.  Teaching requires another seperate action in the others that are participating in the event.  So teaching requires learning.  Therefore you cannot teach without a learner.  Teaching is dependant on learning.

But does learning require teaching?  I would argue that learning and teaching are a dance, each dependant on the other and made better by each other.  I don't think that the teacher and the learner must be different people, but I do believe the richest learning comes from engaged teachers and enthusiastic learners.

Now that we have established that learning and teaching are codependant events and require each other, but what are they.  What does it mean to teach, what does it mean to learn? 

My experience in school leads me to believe that a large number of people believe that teaching is the transfer of knowledge or facts.  In my state Florida, and in fact my country the United States of America, we have a test that tests if students have learned a standardized set of requirements.  We have test that are required for acceptance into our colleges and universities that test our knowledge, knowledge as being defined in two main categories, mathmatics and english.  When taking classes the classes are based mostly on the Teacher knowing something and then sharing that knowledge with the student.  Then we create a test that student must pass to confirm that this transfer has occured.  I will admit that at a very simple level this is teaching and learning, but it is an extreemly narrow view and in fact creates dead ends.  What I mean by dead ends is once the transfer has occured the dance is over.  It is often very task oriented, or very fact based.  Once I know the dates of the major events in Europe then the task of the teacher is complete.  Once I know how to solve that word problem, the learning of that task is done.  But is that fully teaching?  Does that successfully answer our original question?  No.

The purpose of teaching is not limiuted to the simple distribution of knowledge.  In fact that role is being replaced by the internet. Teaching should faciliate exploring knowledge, how to gather facts and the more importantly what to do with them when you have facts.  Having facts and not being able to using them, except in perhaps Trivial Pursuit, is pretty useless.  So teaching needs to create users of knowledge or maybe even better creators of knowledge.  When people are successful at teaching the results are people that can gather facts, interperate those facts, and the extrapolate on those facts. The grand purpose of teaching is to create thinkers,  independant, creative thinkers.  And thinkers want to become learners.  Thinkers engage and challenge their teachers because they will see the dance and understand that it is in the dance that there is an opportunity to enrich the experience even more.


Charles Strange
Thinker