The teacher

Mr Aaron Wise Leighland Christian School Ulverstone Tasmania, Australia

All knowledge and all wisdom that has held and holds rule over understanding has been, and is forever, to be learnt. This is a truism that pervades our current situation as much as when life first began. In the past much time and effort has been spent on how to teach students the infallible truths that are necessary for life and for living. To a great degree, this has been done away with technological advances, creating a state whereby almost anything can be taught to anyone. The learning environment has been transformed, with the child at the centre being fed learning experiences of such a highly tuned nature that learning is obliged to occur at optimal levels. Exacting degrees of challenge and variety motivate a student to achieve all that he or she can, while being supported by rest and leisure activities that are further calculated with precision to support the achievement of these individualised learning goals.

Teachers no longer concern themselves with the day to day routines of planning lessons and managing student progress. The students’ learning is controlled and so is their cognitive dissidence. Every student’s response to stimuli, whether conscious or not, is detected and responded to in order to produce the perfect state for learning. Thus, technology has progressed and controlled pedagogical factors to the extent that there is no longer the question of how to teach students. The question now is what to teach students.

This question has been answered in two ways, through democracy or through dictatorship. Democracy places the direction of learning in the hands of the learners, with democratic decision-making processes used to determine what is taught. In this process the students are seen as controlling the direction of their own learning, just as in a democratic society the people determine the direction of the state.

This process has, however, been complicated by the individualised nature of learning made available through technology. It is no longer a whole school or even a whole class who work through a common curriculum. Technology has meant that individual learning programs are able to be tailored to every individual student’s need. Thus, while the students may be physically in the same class under the direction of a single teacher, the curriculum that they are studying may be worlds apart. One student may be studying the heights of literature while the student next to them may have only progressed to Green Eggs and Ham. One student may be proving the most complex of scientific theorems, while a fellow student recovers from their hand-eye coordination lesson.

A constituency of one

However, because of this individualised learning, a state has been reached whereby, in the democracy of learning, there is a constituency of one. All votes are unanimous and support the will of the people. There are no debates; there are no special interest groups; there is simply unity in direction for the common good of ‘me’.

But how do the people know what is the common good is? How do they know what they want to know? Who educates children about the choices they should make? Therein is the tautology. Without the initial undemocratic outwardly enforced education of the child, he or she is not able to make the self-directed democratic decisions as to what should be learnt.

The response to this is the dictatorship model of learning. Here the curriculum is externally enforced, with the students learning what has been decided upon as being worthy of knowing. When presented with the material to be learnt, the student may not be aware of the motives of the curriculum but, thanks to technology, they will enjoy what is being taught and believe it is worthwhile.

But who has the right, the privilege and the responsibility of deciding what an individual child should know. Are there universal truths that every child should know or are there various sets of wisdom that some should know and some should not. With technology willing and able to inculcate even the most heinous of truths into unsuspecting children, who or what can be trusted to make the omnipotent decision as to what to teach a child.

This dictatorship model does, however, appear to go against one of our most cherished values, that of free will. For the individual to be an individual, they must be allowed to make free choices regarding who they are and who they are to become. If an outside entity is making choices regarding the very foundations of what an individual learns, how can that individual be said to be truly free. Surely freedom, the right that we cherish so dearly, is at risk if it is not the individual who makes all the choices regarding what they are to be.

But perhaps this is the grand design? Are we created not to be free? From the moment of conception, the unborn child is taught and manipulated by the nurturing mother whose every thought, emotion and action shapes the child into what he or she will become. The child graduates from the womb with a range of understandings and predispositions. The mother and those she came in contact with have, even unconsciously, already determined the future direction of the child.

Dare we say that this is wrong? Would anyone argue that the mother had no right to teach her child during these nine months of pregnancy? And how could we enforce a decision that states that the way of nature is wrong? It appears that the answers to these questions are self-evident and only a fool would argue otherwise. But, could it be that this is merely the way we have been taught to think. Can we overcome our preconceived notions of reality enough to accept the possibility that the given standards and procedures of life as we know it are wrong? Can we ignore all of our generationally inherited mental constructs long enough to understand what it would be like if a child were really born a blank slate on which all possibilities were equal? Instead of one child who is a product of many, what if there was a child who was one from none?

How would such a child be raised? To what end would all of the child’s learning be focused? What would we want this child to be able to know and do that is of such importance that other skills and knowledge should be forsaken? When all is said and done, the question still remains: what should we teach this student? And more so upon this, what should we teach every individual student? Answering this question is as much a dilemma in our current situation as it has always been and, as always, it is the teacher’s role to work through the solution.