Teaching Is Cheating
We are all taught that somehow this information is inside them and that we need to draw it out.
From this essay, titled How Progressive Teaching Is Failing Students, by Katharine Birbalsingh:
I spoke to a group of teachers yesterday trying to give advice about how to make explicit teaching work. Twenty to 30 years ago, it was normal for every teacher to just teach from the front. As you are looking at me now, you're listening to what I'm saying. It's much easier to do that if you're looking at me, but in most classrooms these days you wouldn't be looking at me. You would be facing each other. Imagine if I was giving this lecture and instead of looking at me, you were looking at those books and you were looking at the mirrors by the windows back there. I mean it's a bit weird looking in that direction and yet I'm standing over here. But this is the reality of our classrooms, that special needs children are looking at the back of the wall when the teacher is at the front.
The reason that's happening is because the teacher isn't leading the learning. The teacher has been taught by the teacher training agencies not to do this. The teacher feels guilty. What I was explaining yesterday is that we have been taught that teaching is cheating. That's what we think. So teachers genuinely think, oh no, I mustn't tell them because that's somehow giving them the answer. How are they meant to know that this is a triangle and this is a square unless you tell them? You have to tell them. Once you've told them, you can then ask them a little bit later, "Tell me, which one's the triangle, which one's the square?" If you have never told them, they can't possibly know it.
As I say that, it seems obvious. I promise you in the education sector nowadays, it is not obvious. We are all taught that somehow this information is inside them and that we need to draw it out. The story I always tell is when little Amy is sitting at the front and you are asking a question [of the class] to which you haven't told them the answer; you haven't taught them this. You're imagining you're drawing it out of the child. But little Amy knows the answer. Why? Because when she goes home in the evenings, she sits with her parents and talks about the issues of the day and reads the books in her parents' bedroom. She also goes to museums and art galleries and so on. So every time you ask a question, little Amy knows the answer.
Little Johnny at the back of the classroom has no idea, and he thinks to himself, 'gosh, how come Amy always knows the answer? I must be really dumb.' Because what Johnny doesn't think in that moment is, 'I must be from a different socio-economic background.' He doesn't think that. What he thinks is 'I'm dumb.' He then misbehaves and he keeps on misbehaving because his self-esteem takes a hit every time the teacher asks a question to which he doesn't know the answer. Eventually he gets sent out of class and gets a special needs stamp on him, which ruins him forever. Then, when he leaves school functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate, we say, 'it was because he was poor.'
But that was not the reason; it was because we never taught him properly.
