Over the years, I have been writing about misconceptions regarding the schooling process. The purpose of these posts is to explain why I disagree with various comments that I have heard people make about schooling. These are meant as personal thoughts rather than conclusive proof, and I will admit that I'm not always the best at explaining my thoughts. Regardless, I have decided that I should be willing to share these posts when I encounter someone online who makes an argument that I have already discussed.
What if we look at teaching as an external influence on learning? Can you be an external influence that helps someone learn something that you don't know? It's hard to fully explain, but I would say yes. You can teach someone in an area that you don't personally know if the learner has an easier time figuring things out from what you are telling them.
If teaching is an external influence, you have to embrace the idea that learning is far more substantial to the educational process than teaching. There aren't many people who truly embrace this mismatch. Let's look at the other meaning of teaching. You can view teaching and learning as equal processes, but this requires acceptance of teaching as an internal process.
With this definition, you could say that everything you are learning requires a teacher. The catch is that you have to embrace the idea that the learner is also doing the bulk of the teaching. If you are learning new things, then you are teaching yourself things that you don't already know.
Even if you downplay the internal learning process, where did the learning originate? You can argue that the teacher learned from a teacher, and that teacher learned from a teacher. This can't go back forever. There had to be a first time it was learned. Who taught anything before it was first learned? This had to have been through other means. If learning must be accompanied by teaching, the initial time anything was learned had to have been taught by someone who didn't already know what they were teaching. The learning and teaching evolve alongside the developing understanding of the learner and teacher.
There’s actually a third way people like to look at teaching. They view it as work done by the teaching profession. In this case, I shouldn’t even need an explanation. You don’t need a member of the teaching profession to know something for you to learn it.
A lot of teachers use this argument to criticize homeschooling. This is a misunderstanding of homeschooling. Parents generally don’t know as much as teachers collectively know. This would mean the children shouldn’t be able to learn as much as they could in school. Of course, there are factors in learning beyond what the teacher knows. If you are a lousy teacher, which is common in our schools, does it really matter how much you know? I should also point out that many forms of homeschooling involve children working with more than just their parents.
Admittedly, this isn't my best explanation, but I want to make one thing clear. If you embrace the mindset that you can't teach what you don't know, you will hinder your ability to teach. This also sets a maximum for what we can collectively know. Each generation can know less than the previous generation but not more. If we care about future generations, we need to be open to learners learning beyond what the teacher knows.
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