April 5, 2019, by aeyep6

Are your teachers teaching?

Despite what people may think, in Philosophy we explore many real-world issues – today I had a lecture about what it means to teach. I’m sure you’ve all sat in classes thinking, ‘I’m not learning anything’, but does this mean the teacher wasn’t teaching?

With classes like these, the teacher may have a detailed lesson plan, resources to teach, and was speaking loudly and slowly enough for everyone to hear. Yet you still felt that you didn’t learn anything. It still seems wrong that the teacher wasn’t teaching – what else were they doing? According to ‘intention’ accounts, this is teaching because they intended to teach. But ‘learning’ accounts of teaching would disagree because the learner did not learn.

Now imagine an actor who was told to act as a teacher for a staged school with child actors. However, he went to the wrong school and taught real pupils instead, and they felt that they learned a lot. This is not teaching under the intention account because his intention was to act (not teach), but it is under the learning account.

Fisher and Tallant believe that teaching is judgement-dependent. This means that someone is teaching if people judge them to be teaching, meaning that both the examples can be teaching. The person judging them must be under ‘ideal conditions’ to learn. For example, someone cannot learn if they are drunk. Even if you think that your friend has taught you something while you were drunk!

An issue with this is that one person may judge someone to be teaching, and another may not. A response to this is to ‘bite the bullet’ (a common term in Philosophy) and accept that this is an issue, but the rest of the account is good enough for this to not matter.

What do you think? Which of the three accounts is the best?

Image 1: https://unsplash.com/photos/zFSo6bnZJTw
Image 2: https://unsplash.com/photos/_bX5tdMDBOc

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