Taught, Not Learned

If I say I teach people but they do not learn is it their fault or mine? If they do not learn then can I assert that I really taught them? The word, “teach” must carry the implication of learning on the part of students. One teacher was heard to say, “I taught them that last term and they did not learn it.” Was that his fault or theirs? Did he really teach them if they did not learn? And to what degree is this inefficiency carried on in schools all over the globe.

Everywhere there are teachers beavering away and preparing lessons which their pupils will not understand or will fail to learn for one reason or another. Maybe the mind of the pupil is elsewhere. Maybe he or she has come to a point where they do not understand something because it has not been explained. More likely the pupil has lost the thread of it because his mind has wandered or he was bored with it all and is daydreaming at the time.

It must follow, then, that the moment attention is lost, a breakdown of communication occurs. At that point the student is no longer learning, nor is the teacher teaching. Does that mean that the teacher has to compel or to attract the student’s attention? Can this be done all the time for all the class of pupils or of students? Can a teacher possibly do this while at the same time keeping track of the planned content of the lesson he or she believes himself to be teaching? It seems an impossible task, and it probably is an impossible task.

Do we compel attention with sanctions such as detentions, lines or the threat of failure? Do we make our lessons so entertaining that the students remember the jokes or the asides but forget, if they ever learned, what the lesson was supposed to be about? How sad that only a few of our pupils and students will have learned only a fraction of what we set out to teach and that fraction imperfectly. Some of the students are likely to be disaffected, some to be dreaming and some only feigning attention so that even if one gives out punishments to those whose attention is seen to be wandering there will inevitably be those whose wide-eyed interest is but a mask behind which the mind is traveling, if not “on wings of song,” certainly to “lands far away”.