METASIGNIFICANCES 6

#6 teach

As a youngster, I once recall being most impressed when a close relative uttered a few words in French to some tourists on Brighton beach. What amazing talent and ability! Similarly, the day I first turned up at a new dance class to see couples showing off their incredibly fancy free-flowing sylph-like moves. How elegant! However, not long after, when I myself had acquired some of these skills and was able to judge with the benefit of a little experience, it dawned on me, horribly, that these 'sylphs' were in fact clumsy clodhopping oafs each cursed with two left feet - and that also my relative's spoken French was in fact a living desecration to the tongue of Voltaire.

I've made this kind of mistake many times. One of the reasons that the human animal is so irredeemably stupid, beyond even the ingrained recidivism, is that so much of what constitutes our decision-making, our belief systems, and our world knowledge, comes not from any innate cognitive abilities, but from our utter fucking ignorance. I firmly believed those dancers were amazing, not because I knew things about dancing - on the contrary - because I knew absolutely nothing!

The teaching model is one based on this same model, i.e. one based on presumed ignorance. If ever there were an activity that required one's healthy disprespect, it's this one. Universities, schools, colleges, polytechnics, both private and public, one and all.

The basic model consists of having a room full of empty vessels ('students') and one large vessel (the omniscient one, the 'teacher') replete with 'information'. The latter pours tiny egotistically-laced drops of their precious liquid into each of the empty vessels for which much gratitude and respect is expected to be shown.

Of course, students are not empty vessels and the teacher's 'information' may well not be true, relevant, or useful - but success within the model tolerates only your submission to it and an implied acceptance of your ignorance. And, by and large, students do accept it, and submit; troublemakers and dissenters are quickly retired from the entreprise, either voluntarily or mandatorily.

To teach is to promote ignorance.
Teaching cannot stop people from learning.
What people learn is despite teachers not because of them.