Education and Teaching: Meaning, Nature and Requirements

The word education is traced to three Latin roots, and examiners like to ask which root carries which meaning. Educare means to bring up, to nourish or to train; educere means to lead out or to draw out; educatum means the act of teaching or training. The “drawing out” sense (educere) is the one that fits the Indian and progressive view that the child already holds potential which education brings to the surface, whereas the “putting in” view treats the child as an empty vessel to be filled. This is the single most useful distinction in the whole subject: almost every thinker below can be placed on one side or the other.

Education is a lifelong, purposeful and social process. It has a narrow meaning (schooling, instruction in an institution) and a broad meaning (everything that shapes a person from birth to death). It is also described as a bipolar process (John Adams: teacher and learner) and a tripolar process (John Dewey: teacher, learner and society, because the curriculum and the aims come from society). Educational agencies are classed as formal (schools, universities, with planned curriculum and certification), informal (family, peer group, media, with no planning) and non-formal (open schools, adult literacy centres, planned but outside the formal system, with flexible timing).

• Mahatma Gandhi: education is “an all-round drawing out of the best in child and man: body, mind and spirit.” Note the three-part (body, mind, spirit) structure.

• Swami Vivekananda: education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man. This is the classic statement of the educere view.

• Rabindranath Tagore: the highest education is that which does not merely give information but makes our life harmonious with all existence. Associated with Shantiniketan and Visva-Bharati.

• Aristotle: education is the creation of a sound mind in a sound body.

• Plato: education is the development in the body and soul of all the beauty and perfection of which the individual is capable.

• Pestalozzi: education is the natural, harmonious and progressive development of man’s innate powers.

• Froebel: education is the unfoldment of what is already enfolded in the germ. He is the father of the kindergarten (“garden of children”).

• Rousseau: advocated negative education and a return to nature in his book Emile; the child should not be forced into adult moulds and should learn from natural consequences.

• John Locke: the mind at birth is a tabula rasa (blank slate), which supports the “filling in” view.

• John Dewey: education is a continuous reconstruction of experience; education is not preparation for life, it is life; the school is a miniature (embryonic) society. Detailed in 1.5.

Teaching is a deliberate, planned and interactive activity in which a more knowledgeable person arranges conditions that help another person learn. It is not the same as lecturing, telling or merely covering the syllabus. The most important conceptual idea is Dewey’s analogy: teaching is to learning what selling is to buying. A shopkeeper who has not sold anything has not really been selling, and a teacher whose students have not learned has not really taught. Teaching is therefore judged by its results in learning, not by the amount said.

Key definitions, with the logic examiners test:

• B. O. Smith: teaching is “a system of actions intended to induce learning.” The word intended matters: the actions are goal-directed, and the word system tells you teaching is organised, not random. This is the most frequently tested definition.

• N. L. Gage: teaching is a form of interpersonal influence aimed at changing the behaviour potential of another person.

• John Brubacher: teaching is the arrangement and manipulation of a situation in which there are gaps and obstructions which an individual will seek to overcome and from which he will learn in the course of doing so.

• H. C. Morrison: teaching is an intimate contact between a more mature personality and a less mature one, designed to further the education of the latter.

• Edmund Amidon: teaching is an interactive process, primarily involving classroom talk, which takes place between teacher and pupil during certain definable activities. This is the basis of interaction analysis (Topic 6).

• Thomas Green: teaching is a set of activities that may include telling, showing, demonstrating and questioning, and it need not always be formal lecturing.

Questions often ask which word fits which situation. Instruction is the narrower, content-focused part of teaching, concerned mainly with the cognitive domain (imparting knowledge and skills). Teaching is broader: it includes instruction but also develops attitudes, values and thinking, and is concerned with the whole person. Training aims at a specific skill or habit through practice (typing, driving, surgery). Conditioning builds automatic responses through repetition and reinforcement without necessarily involving understanding (the behaviourist model). Indoctrination transmits beliefs in a way that does not allow the learner to question or examine them, and is regarded as the opposite of genuine teaching because it closes the mind. A useful test: if the learner’s reason and choice are respected, it is teaching; if they are bypassed, it is conditioning or indoctrination.

John Dewey (1859 to 1952), an American philosopher and the leading figure of pragmatism, argued that knowledge arises from experience and is tested by its consequences. His Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (1896) tried out his ideas. Four ideas dominate the exam: (1) education as growth and reconstruction of experience: each experience should leave the learner better able to handle the next; (2) learning by doing: activity, not passive listening, is the route to understanding; (3) the school as a miniature society: the school should be a simplified, purified and balanced community life, not a place cut off from real life; and (4) democratic education, with shared decision-making and respect for the learner’s interests.

Dewey also described reflective thinking in How We Think (1910) as five phases: (i) a felt difficulty, (ii) location and definition of the problem, (iii) suggestion of possible solutions (hypotheses), (iv) reasoning out the consequences of each suggestion, and (v) observation and experiment leading to acceptance or rejection. The sequence “felt difficulty first, testing last” is a very common memory question. His ideas were converted into classroom practice by his follower W. H. Kilpatrick as the project method.

Teaching is purposeful (aimed at objectives), interactive (a two-way process), planned yet flexible, a science (because it uses research-based principles) and an art (because it needs creativity, expression and personal style), a continuous improvement process, and a social act with moral responsibility. The three variables of teaching are the independent variable (the teacher, teaching style and strategies), the dependent variable (the learner’s learning outcomes) and the intervening variable (learner’s motivation, ability, attention and readiness, which cannot be seen directly but affect results).

The basic requirements for effective teaching are: clear objectives; mastery of content; knowledge of learner characteristics; suitable methods and materials; a healthy classroom climate; two-way communication; reinforcement and feedback; and proper evaluation. Phases of teaching (Philip Jackson): the pre-active phase (planning: setting objectives, selecting content and methods), the interactive phase (actual classroom delivery and student interaction) and the post-active phase (evaluation, feedback, reflection and re-planning).

Maxims are time-tested rules that make teaching natural and psychological: known to unknown; simple to complex; concrete to abstract; whole to part; analysis to synthesis; induction to deduction; psychological to logical order; empirical to rational; actual to representative. The one that trips candidates most is psychological to logical: begin from what is natural and interesting to the child, and only later arrange knowledge in the logical order of the subject. Induction to deduction means moving from examples to the rule first, and then using the rule on new cases.