[wobblybubble]

A lot of what teachers do is exactly just that—basically talking at the pupils, as if they were vessels who are supposed to have their heads filled up with knowledge.

Proper learning is supposed to be more active and pupil-directed. Look at the Deweyite schools in America.

If you find that to be a belittling description then I’m sorry, but that’s largely what teachers do. And it’s been critiqued for a long time by thoughtful people who care about pedagogy, so you can’t simply dismiss it as some kind of “woe be the state of education” phenomenom.

[another_story]

“Proper education” is student, culture and even teacher dependent. There is no singular best practice. So many of the sit down, shut up models of education in other countries produce students which routinely trounce US students in math and science. At the same time, so does Finland.

My point above is that the belittling is a major part of the problem. You want to denigrate an entire profession, sure, but it has consequences, something we're seeing as experienced teachers leave the profession.

[wobblybubble]

> “Proper education” is student, culture and even teacher dependent. There is no singular best practice.

In my experience it is not productive to have this kind of conversation with teachers since they will go back and forth between (1) general, vague praise for mass education, and then (2) vacuous, relativistic statements that says nothing about education other than “it’s relative” once they are confronted with concrete problems.

They seem to identify too strongly with their teacher identity to be up for that discussion.