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> A teacher cannot teach a student who doesn't make an effort to learn. Quite so. But a poor teacher can do quite a lot to impair a student who does make an effort to learn, and, at least in the public schools of the United States, there is little meaningful incentive for a teacher to be other than poor. Not to say that all US public school teachers are poor, of course; there are at least a few really excellent ones, or were when I was a student. Excellence, though, is anything but a requirement. I'd also argue that a really good teacher can elicit from her students the sort of effort you describe; I've seen it happen -- indeed, most of my basic facility with the English language, I gained under the tutelage of precisely such a teacher. That's a more complicated proposition, of course, but I start to wonder whether or not it's at the core of the current argument. It's not hard, or so the US public school system would have us believe, to teach someone enough of a given subject that she can qualify to teach it herself. But is that the essential feature of pedagogy? Or is it instead to lead a class full of students, in such fashion as to overcome the basic distaste, for complex and difficult learning without immediate reward, which is part of the human heritage? |