"Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than—learning… The teacher is far ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they—he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices."
---Martin Heidegger
Quoted in Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi and Patricia Donahue. The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. NY: Pearson Longman, 2005: viii.
3 comments:
A great passage, and a timely reminder.
Thanks Matt
A deeper if lesser known quote is Emil J. Piscitelli's, one indebted to the Canadian philosopher Bernard J. F. Lonergan's wise perspective on education:
In cognitional terms the teacher is a knower and the student is coming to know. In hermeneutic terms the teacher is the one who speaks from the vantage point of understanding or knowing while the student is the one who listens in order to understand or to know or to know how to act.A teacher cannot teach a student what he, the teacher, has not already learned. Thus, mastery of the subject to be taught is a necessary condition or an essential quality of a teacher. Teachers who have not mastered their fields of inquiry must pretend to have mastery or they will lose the respect of their students. Discipline is the fundamental characteristic of the student. Here discipline means submitting oneself to the teacher for the sake of the thing to be learned. This is what it means to be a disciple. What corresponds to the discipline of the student in the teacher is the training he gives the student. Similarly, what corresponds to mastery in the teacher is the achievement of a competence in the student. If the conditions for teaching and learning are mastery and discipline respectively, then the acts of teaching and learning are training and gaining a competence respectively. Mastery gives the teacher the knowledge necessary for the effective training of the student. In other words without mastery the teacher would not know either the proper prescriptions or the proper application of the prescriptions to be given to the student to meet the demands of a particular set of activities to be learned. So mastery is more than competence, it is a whole set of competencies that gives the teacher control over the whole range of the subject to be learned as well as the ability to train a student properly. Still training and discipline are for the sake of the competence to be acquired by the student. Learning in the student depends upon self-discipline and thus training from the teacher depends upon the teacher's own self-mastery.As Piscitelli might also have said: "Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding is a masterful work aimed at both these results."
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