Worth the Read: Applied Andragogy

A powerful piece at NPR makes some salient points about education, in the form of a Literacy Narrative. It tells the story of a "terrible" man who may have been an excellent English teacher - and highlights the difference between politics and teaching theory - and offers some warning about the direction education currently takes. The author Alva Noe says:

however depraved his behavior may have been in other respects, at least in my eyes, his practice as a teacher was grounded on respect. He didn’t tell us what to think. He didn’t manipulate us. He exemplified a phenomenon — a certain kind of caring about literature, and language, and argument — and he trusted us to form our own judgments about that phenomenon.

You’d have to be a fool to send your kids to school to learn what the teacher thinks or believes. So said Augustine, who, like Plato, believed that you can’t teach knowledge by telling. What a good teacher can do is afford his or her pupils an opportunity to learn something, not by telling, but by enabling something to be seen, experienced, learned.......Politicians — at least the politicians in this American culture we live in — use words not to communicate, or to argue, or persuade. They pretend to do this. But they don’t. Politicians, like sales people, are interested in outcomes. They want to influence you and they are interested in your beliefs and attitudes only in so far as these are potentially levers they can manipulate