The Four R's: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, and Relevance

 

Courtesy of Indeed, here is a supposedly ideal answer to the standard interview question for teachers, “What is your teaching philosophy?” In other words, this is what your teaching philosophy is supposed to be. And it is utterly wrong:

“My teaching philosophy is to make my lesson plans relatable. In many cases, when a student can’t identify with the material, it’s harder for them to gather meaning. As a literature teacher, my goal is to help students empathize with characters, places and concepts, especially when those things are different from their own life experiences. As a student, I found stories more memorable when my teachers helped me draw parallels. As a student teacher, I like to make comparisons between older texts, like Shakespeare and modern events. For example, comparing events in the plays to events in pop culture. This not only helps students understand the stories but also helps them draw their own conclusions.”

First, the need for students to “identify with the material.” They are supposed to see “their own life experiences” reflected in the material.

This is the opposite of the point of reading a book in the first place. One reads a novel to get away from one’s own everyday life, to experience the world from another’s perspective. Accordingly, the books that sell the best, that people most enjoy, are set in exotic locales and based on improbable situations: Harry Potter, James Bond, superhero comics and movies, the Da Vinci Code, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Star Wars. The surest way to bore students, and turn them off reading altogether, is to select readings that most closely reflect their own life experience. 

Moreover, this is deliberately preventing them from learning, subverting the entire point of going to school. One already knows about one’s own life situation. 

For the same reason, it is perverse to suggest that minority voices have traditionally been underrepresented in our literature or in the bookstores. Being exotic has always been an advantage. Pauline Johnson used to perform in buckskin. Grey Owl faked his Indian identity. 

As for comparing events in the classical texts to pop culture: always done these days. For years, every text I used had a chapter on the movie “Titanic”; and I could see the students roll their eyes and hear them audibly groan. Not “Titanic” again!

The problems with this approach are many. 

First, the students already know pop culture. They are not learning anything; you’re just wasting their time. 

Second, they probably know it better than the teacher. It is insulting to presume the teacher knows more than they do about such things. Why? What makes them the authority on Taylor Swift? Just because they’re older? Must the students merely knuckle under to established authority? Is this the lesson being taught? 

Third, nothing is so dated and uncool as yesterday’s biggest pop phenomenon. It is impossible to stay current. Especially in textbooks, which take at least a year from composition to publication, and then remain in circulation for years. Pop culture references will always be dated, and wincingly uncool. 

Fourth, everyone will fix on the same obvious pop culture references, going for the biggest bang, the biggest connection with the youngsters, and the thing, like Titanic, so big that even they, uncool old people as they are, are aware of it. Students will encounter the same cultural reference again and again, boring them beyond comprehension. When they could be out learning something.

A similar problem adheres when you try to connect your classic material with “current events.” Nothing is as dead, old, and dull as yesterday’s news. Text can’t possibly keep up, not being reissued daily. To compensate, “current events” in the classroom inevitably means a handful of generic topics: ecology, the environment, or “the environmental crisis”; the issues raised by new technology, considered generically; globalization; peace versus war, and such. There is an obvious problem of ideological bias; but without ideological bias, such topics are desperately repetitious and boring. Yes, pollution is bad. Yes, there are bad things on the Internet. Yes, the world is becoming smaller. Yes, peace is better than war. Snore.

Back in the old days, to avoid these problems, modern history was not taught; only classical history. Modern history, current events? Set that up as formal debates among the students. For the same reason, current novels and recent writing were not taught. Leave those for reading clubs in the common rooms.

Our ancestors had it right.

Teachers' Day

 

October 5 was International Teachers’ Day, a day not generally observed in Canada. It ought to be. There is no more important job than that of teacher. Confucius, the most influential thinker who ever lived, never held any higher position. Neither did Socrates or Aristotle; and who is more influential in Western civilization than they? Yet we know of them only from their students’ reports and lecture notes.

Actually, there is a more influential figure over the West than Socrates or Aristotle: Jesus. His followers, too, addressed him as “Rebbe,” “teacher.” We know him, too, only from their lecture notes.

I expect that most readers can, as I can, remember some special teacher in their past who influenced them deeply, who is responsible in some important way for what they later became. Mr. More in grade 6, who confirmed my love of poetry; of A. Pat Smith in grade 13, who drove me into literature; of Professor John Cooke at Queen’s, who lured me into comparative religion; of Paul Nowack at Ryerson, who found me too old to have had the influence he might have had, but who taught me again the value of storytelling. 

Since being a teacher is about as glorious a job as anyone could have, is seems odd that Canada has no “teachers’ day,” and that Canadian teachers often prefer to call themselves “educators.” As though reaching for some euphemism. Teaching has fallen into disrepute. While we may disagree on the problem and the remedy, we seem all agreed, including teachers, that there is something very wrong with the schools.

This is the more alarming, because it is improbable. We all spontaneously want to learn; we are programmed for it. We all remember with respect approaching awe the good teachers we have had. It must take some doing to poison that well.

Moreover, a culture or civilization that fails to produce great teachers is a culture or civilization that is dying. This is the essential task of a culture: to pass on the accumulated wisdom generation to generation.

The spectacular success of Jordan Peterson shows how deep the hunger is for good teachers. That is what Peterson is: he does not have an especially good record as a researcher. He is a teacher The world is responding..

What have we done to so badly mess things up? 

Teaching Philosophy

Don Bosco

A recent job application asked me for my teaching philosophy. So I might as well subject you, gentle readers, to it as well.

Perhaps the most direct influence on my own thoughts as a teacher has been E.D. Hirsch Jr. and his argument for the need for core cultural competence. This is what first brought me to my commitment to a classical curriculum. Without this shared knowledge, Hirsch argues, the culture breaks down. But I think there is more to it than Hirsch explores, as well; his argument is still purely utilitarian, as though cultural knowledge were itself another skill. Education cannot be just the teaching of some abstract, value-free set of skills. That is sophistry. Education is the formation of souls. And there is nothing so important to the soul as value: What matters? Without settling this initial question, literally, nothing else matters.

Our culture is our repository of wisdom designed to school the soul. Neglect the task of passing it on, and we lose both our souls and our civilization.

In terms of classroom management, my guide is St. John Bosco and his idea of “preventitive discipline.” Which really amounts to one thing: love your students. Be their true friend. I try to remind myself of this little mantra each time just before stepping in to the classroom. It works for me. This does not mean pure permissiveness; this means always acting in the best interests of each student; and respectfully towards a brother or a sister soul.

Of course, I must mention the Socratic method. It has always been the essence of good teaching. You draw students into thinking about the subject, kindling the flame within, rather than feeding them cold data. This is superficially similar to the modern idea of “constructivism,” but opposite in its premise. It is not that students are inventing their own “truths,” as constructivism wants to believe possible, but that truth, as Plato understands, generally becomes evident of itself if you brush away the lies and errors obscuring it. The same idea is really behind the scientific method: science is not some set of facts, but a method of questioning, in order to reveal the mind of God as shown by his works.

Am I saying “question everything”? Yes and no. If you accept that premise, you must begin by questioning that premise. It would be absurd arrogance to suppose you can personally do better than the combined best minds of the ages; and, in the case of revelation, that a human mind can do it without any help from God. Our obvious initial assumption is that our ancestors were not idiots, but knew what they were doing, and had reasons. Chesterton has a good standard: never tear down a fence until you know why it is there.

Gatto's Conspiracy Theory

Marrx's imaginary bugbear, the rich capitalist

One problem with John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education is that it does not account for why the factory model of the public school is found throughout the developed world, not just in the USA. This is what first smells wrong. Then, he finds no “smoking gun,” no clearly stated plan to turn the schools into agents ot social control and repression. Then, the whole thing is based on a conspiracy theory, in the end, and it would have to be a conspiracy so big it is wildly improbable. It is intrinsically improbable that it could all be done without the general public twigging to what was going on, and resisting.

It is probably based on a Marxist model—an imagined elite keeping the masses down. As Donald Akenson points out, qhile it is clear and a truism that schools are there for social control, it is entirely reasonable to suppose that this control is agreed upon by almost everyone, simply “a commonly shared set of values and beliefs” that people in general want to pass on to their children,

Most likely, schools did not evolve in this way based on a definite ulterior plan, including one to keep the lower classes down. Which is to say, if the schools are oppressive and counter-productive, it is the devil's work, not that of any individual or identifiable group. It is the result of a lot of people pursuing selfish interests instead of the general good. It looks planned and deliberate because the devil is a coherent intelligence.

Here is a quote from Woodrow Wilson that you often see; it is the closest thing to a smoking gun Gatto and others seem to come up wit, for which reason it is often quoted,

“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks” (Gatto, p. 59).

This does seem to express the spirit of progressivism as it existed in the early years of the 20th century. In the name of scientific efficiency, influenced by the success of innovations like the assembly line, it looked very much to “experts,” a scientific or pseudo-scientific priesthood, to command and control society to everyone's benefit. And no doubt this philosophy entered the schools. Schools being by their nature a very conservative institution, it is patently in large part still there. One certainly seems to see it in English public schools, and in the assimilation of what should be the most humanistic of pursuits to social science.

But did Wilson then introduce the factory school? Unlikely, since education was a state matter, not within the powers of the federal government. This call for scientific efficiency was a general tendency, supported by most folks, not just a small elite. It continues today in the desire of many if not most parents to see their kids interest themselves in STEM fields—in order to get a good job. They do not see it as simply bowing to the needs of industry.

Here is another quote Gatto digs up from “progressives” of that day:

Ellwood P. Cubberley, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education:

“[R]aw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from governments and industry” (Gatto, p. 61; Cubberley, dissertation, 1905).

Gatto also cites the Rockefeller Foundation's “Occasional Letter Number One.” The subject is a plan to introduce high schools to the poor rural US South. There is certainly at least a tone of condescension towards the lower classes:

“In our dreams … people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets, or men of letters [note the exalted company given educators]. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before us is very simple … we will organize children … and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”

A second baleful wave, as Gatto notes without apparently distinguishing the two movements, hit with the behaviourism of the Thirties through the Sixties. I caught the last years of this in the Sixties, and was horrified. To me, and I think to many, the Sixties counterculture was a reaction against it.

But, oddly, I cannot find any of Gatto's damning, inflammatory quotes about the schools in the document he cites, “The Behavioural Science Teacher Education Project” (1967). The actual document is preoccupied with practical details. In any case, it is from Michigan State University, not the federal or even state government, although it received federal government funding. It is unfortunate, however, in proposing that the instruction of teachers be primarily based on insights obtained by the behavioural sciences. Not only are there no such insights; Noam Chomsky had pretty exploded the behaviourist theory by this time. The behaviourist or audio-lingual method of language learning, embraced en masse by the US military during and after WWII as the new scientific way to learn, had by this time been disproven by studies and abandoned, And behaviourism is profoundly dehumanizing; strict behaviourists hold that there is no soul, no free will, no interior life. It is also even more elitist than progressivism: all power is put in the hands of the practitioner, and the students are mere objects.

It is also unfortunate, but typical of the time, that the BSTEP document calls for educational policy to be closely coordinated with the findings of futurists. All very scientific, of course. Must keep up with the Russians and Sputnik. Unfortunately, futurists are almost always wrong; it is pure pseudo-science. Peak oil, global warming, population bombs, environmentalism, all that nonsense.

GM Futurliner, New York World's Fair, 1939

As Stephen Dudner, co-author of Freakonomics, points out, “experts”who predict the future have a worse track record than the average man in the street, and a worse record than flipping a coin. This is because there is a natural bias to say things are going to change. To experts, either the future is utopia or the sky is always falling. If an expert does not do this, nobody is interested in his or her predictions, nobody cares, nobody will pay him or her. But in the real world, things go on as they are far more often and for a much longer time than they dramatically change.

So it is a sucker's game to listen to futurologists. For education and the schools, it gives well-paid employment to a self-appointed professional elite at the expense of the students.

More to come...

Class and Class

Modern Times

The public schools transparently do not teach us what we need to know to be successful in life. This has to be deliberate, since the private schools to which the rich send their scions almost always do.

The first thing you really need to get somewhere, in any field, is training in rhetoric. This may sound fancy and arcane: if you prefer, call it “salesmanship.” Same thing. Warren Buffet, who did not benefit from a private school education, claims that he learned everything he needed to know for business success, not in college, but by taking a Dale Carnegie course. You have to be able to persuade, one on one or before an audience, and there are known rules and techniques for doing this. Why shouldn't everyone learn them?

For current examples of the power of rhetoric, consider how effective Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump have seemed in the ongoing presidential stakes in the US. They may or may not have had formal training in rhetoric—Trump, having been a private school kid, almost certainly did—but their business success was necessarily built on special talents in this regard, and these talents show through on the political stage. They may be outsiders to politics, but their ability to sway an audience has been honed in boardrooms and in presentations to employees. Steve Jobs is another great master of the craft.

Is there something disreputable about all this? Only if it is not guided by moral principles. Any good pastor, too, must develop skills at rhetoric. That's what gave us Mike Huckabee.

Early assembly line

The second thing you need is parliamentary procedure. If that sounds fancy, try “how to run a meeting.” As per Robert's Rules, or Bourinot's Rules of Order. Without this, it is impossible to organize others to get anything done. It therefore seems quite sinister not to teach students at high school age how meetings work; it seems to deliberately exclude them from power. While that might make school administrators' lives easier, the lack of knowledge of proper procedure is therefore endemic in our organizations, public and private. The price we pay for this is appalling. People commonly come out of meetings not knowing what, if anything, has actually been agreed upon, and certainly without a sensed moral commitment to do anything. As a result, usually nothing gets done. Businesses atrophy, and democratic politics tend not to work.

The third thing you need is some knowledge of fair debate. Everyone should be able to recognize and explain the classic logical fallacies. Without this, for all practical purposes, you cannot think. If you cannot think for yourself, you are too easily led. You can be taken in by any unprincipled party. Or you can be pushed around. Debating skills are like intellectual martial arts.

Public schools claim all the time that they want to teach their students how to think, to foster “critical thinking skills”--which lie is why I feel obliged to call this subject “debate” instead of “critical thinking skills.” Because schools commonly conceal under that latter title its opposite, indoctrination in approved political positions. “Debate” at least implies that, as standard practice, two contrary positions are both examined on equal terms, by the same objective criteria.

The fourth thing you need, and are systematically not taught, is mnemonics. How to remember is, quite simply, how to learn, and it is deliberately suppressed in public schools. The term blatant malpractice comes to mind. The reasoning commonly given is that memorization is simply and purely mechanical. Very well; if so, so is mathematics. So is being able to read.

New model assembly-line school, 1913.

 
But it is not so. Properly used and properly understood, mnemonics involves the development of the imagination. It is a fundamentally creative activity. And if you are going to go on to study medicine, or law, or science, or anything at all, you are going to need it.

The fifth thing you need is cultural context. That is, you need to know the basic history of your culture, and its important cultural milestones, as understood by the upper classes. Without these, you are effectively excluded from the conversation at these higher levels, because, as E.D. Hirsch has demonstrated, it is largely written and spoken in a cultural code based on such shared knowledge. Perhaps it is wrong that this is so. Perhaps not; some ideas are probably too complex to express except through allusion. Nevertheless, either way, this is so. You need to be aware of at least the plots of the most important pieces of literature, and at least the outline of history. You need to know the choicest quotes from Shakespeare and from a variety of other important figures. Without them, you are going to miss all the allusions. Reading, perhaps you can now Google it. Speaking, you cannot. In any case, terms like “sour grapes,” “Pharisee,” “Pyrrhic victory,” or “Orwellian” tend to be too complex in their implications to be quickly picked up on the fly.

It is telling, surely, that the public schools are currently systematically removing history and canonical literature from the classrooms.

So there you have it: the five essential high school subjects. Rhetoric, parliamentary procedure, debate, mnemonics, and cultural literacy. I add theology and ethics for any religious school, and all schools should be religious on principle. Other stuff is window dressing, and I include science and math. There is probably not the time for this. The “three R's” should be under their belts by this time. They need now to finish this basic platform. Specialization can be left to the tertiary level. As has often been observed, most people never need to use either the math or the science they learn in high school.

Next question: why are the public schools systematically failing to educate students in what they most need to know? Individual reasons are given for cutting out this and that, but it all adds up to something that looks like a deliberate attempt to keep the average student down. And that is because it is.

The “progressives” of Woodrow Wilson's time, back in the early years of the assembly line, saw the new efficient factory model as the ideal model for education as well. No more one-room school houses. They decided the public schools were there to produce the little cogs and willing wheels needed by industry. We simply did not need a nation of leaders. Best not to let the peons think above their station. This tradition is continued, energetically, in the current fetish for STEM education (science, technology, engineering, math). These things will earn you a good pay packet, sure, for a few years or maybe more, but not a seat in the boardroom. The tradition is also well entrenched in the growing fetish for the idea of “efficiency” in education, and for clear, measurable results. Teaching must be a “science.” Except, of course, for their own kids.

It may well be true that we only need so many leaders. I frankly doubt that. My impression is that we are training too few. As globalization and automation increase, leadership may be the only career available. On the other hand, if so, these leaders ought not in a democracy be selected by right of birth. Every child who shows the capacity for it ought to be educated for potential leadership, and let the best man or woman win. The society as a whole would benefit.

Confucius had it right. “A gentleman,” he observed, “is not a tool.”

The Problem with Teach for America: Less is More

Problem: our current vision of school is as a factory, where learning should be efficient and scientific. And everyone emerges identical.

Here’s a strange article objecting to Teach for America, the programme that hires top graduates fresh out of college, gives them five weeks’ training, and then sends them into the schools. It argues that the preparation the enrollees get in this program is absurd. This can easily be seen to be the case. Yet its proposed solution is to give enrollees more such training. And this despite the fact that, as the article admits, those who get more of the same training—those who go to Teachers’ Colleges--do not do as well as the Teach for America grads. The evidence for this last is actually far stronger than the author would like.

The proper solution is obvious: eliminate the five weeks’ training. Granted, it might be better to have some training, but not the training they are ever likely to get under the current system. The training they currently get is ultimately coming from the Teachers’ Colleges.

On what’s wrong with the training, the author could again be clearer. She quotes approvingly the core message she was given: “as a 2011 corps member and leader, you have a deep personal and collective responsibility to ground everything you do in your belief that the educational inequality that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines is both our nation’s most fundamental injustice and a solvable problem. This mindset… is at the core of our Teach For America—Metro Atlanta Community.”

This is a political statement. Working as a public school teacher should not require a set of political or religious “beliefs.” And this particular faith is actually antithetical to the educational enterprise. The job of the teacher is most naturally not to ensure “educational equality”—i.e., that all students get the same results. It is to strive to get for each student the best results of which he is capable. Equality of results necessarily requires holding the best students back.

Moreover, with this core principle, why should the author be surprised, or frustrated, by a student’s argument that there is no point in applying himself, since "I did the same thing last year and I passed"? Smart kid. Where everyone wins, and the hardest workers are held back, working hard is for suckers.

Come to think of it, this enforced equality of outcome could have a lot to do with the discipline problems the author, and so many other teachers, complain about. The problem is, the kids are not stupid. They get the mixed messages, and know the Mickey Mouse Show when they see it.

The “sea of jargon, buzzwords, and touchy-feely exercises” in which our author was immersed for five weeks must indeed have been uncomfortable for a good student. But welcome to Teachers' College: imagine a full year or two of this. And then emerging to subject one’s students to much of the same.

These things are vague time-wasters for a reason: the current educational establishment has nothing else to offer. They have no specific suggestions on how to manage an unruly class, or on how to improve student retention, because they have no idea how to do it. If they knew, they could probably convey it well enough in five weeks. But if they ever say something concrete, their bluff could be called; the next—or worse, the last—study is just as likely to discredit it. the studies all go around in a circle, and never come to any solid conclusions. They never will, for the human mind is too complex a thing.

How to Teach Stuff

Spot on. And completely contrary to what is taught in Ed Schools.

Here is what the Ed schools teach:

Point 1: you're not supposed to be up there on the stage.

Point 2: you're not supposed to talk.

Point 3: it's always the students' fault.

Don't Taze Me, Teach!

A friend sends the following piece about a student who won a court case against a bullying teacher.

http://news.yahoo.com/student-booted-class-saying-don-t-accept-gays-123034366.html


The case is not egregious—the school board itself ruled in the student's favour. I do wonder if the matter would have turned out so well in Canada, where freedom of speech is far less well respected. Moreover, it needs to be said straight off that the student is ill-informed about his own Catholicism. Catholicism certainly does not reject gays. In my experience, gays often make the best Catholics.

But it does illustrate a few interesting points. First, how "anti-bullying" programmes are so easily turned by any teacher already inclined to bullying into an ideal bullying opportunity. If you want to reduce bullying, you do not give more power to those already in a position of authority. Yet this is exactly what anti-bullying programmes do.

Next, the fact that the students seemed to stand up against this bullying speaks well of them. We hear a lot of complaints from teachers—and parents, for that matter—about today's students being harder and harder to discipline. But I wonder how much of this supposed growing problem with discipline in the schools us really due to the fact that we increasingly put people at the heads of classrooms that the students innately cannot respect, because they are genuinely not worthy of that respect. And how much of it is because the schools are trying to push political correctness and indoctrination instead of clear thinking and real learning?

In such a circumstance, the only intelligent and honourable response is to argue back and to rebel. Would we really want our kids quietly accepting this? Do we want our schools to turn out "Good Germans"?

I wonder how much less our supposed classroom discipline problems would be if we went back to the common-sense method of teacher recruitment: selecting teachers on the basis of 1) subject knowledge, and 2) good moral character.

What Makes Finnish Schools So Successful?

An infographic.

But they bury the lede.

Is it really having no homework that makes the difference? While I have a lot of sympathy with letting kids be kids, I think the overwhelming difference between the Finnish education system and less successful systems, borne out by studies, is this:

Only the top ten percent of college graduates are admitted into teaching programs.

This is the opposite of the practice in the US. But it is the same practice as in Korea and China, both with significantly successful education systems on the same metrics.

Public Schools and Parental Malpractice

Glen Reynolds of Instapundit, observed recently that sending your children to public school amounts to parental malpractice. He is referring to recent cases in which children have been suspended from school for such nefarious violations as playing with a pink toy gun that shoots bubbles, or pointing a finger at another child and saying “bang!”

He is right enough about that—traumatizing young children for no reason but to satisfy some endemic urge to bully.

But there is far worse. Most public education systematically prevents children from learning. Why else would homeschooled children consistently outperform public school kids?

It's a predictable result of trying to make teaching a “profession.” Anyone who has themselves attended school for twelve years, let alone seventeen or more, will have a thorough education in two things, in about equal measure: the subjects taught, and how best to teach them. A far better grounding in teaching, in other words, than in any other conceivable trade they could choose. Those who have earned the highest marks will of course be those who have learned best how to teach and learn.

Selecting a teacher should therefore be a simple matter: hire the person with the highest marks over the longest years of schooling.

However, this leaves no justification for a teaching “profession.” Necessarily, in order to justify its claim to special expertise and demand higher rates of pay, education schools must offer something that cannot and will not be acquired in the school classroom.

In other words, something that has nothing to do with good teaching.

To survive, they must take the common teaching practice, and turn it on its head. To prove you are a “qualified” teacher, you must do something that defies common sense, so that nobody who has not been to teacher's college would think of doing it this way.

Something, in all certainty, that is going to interfere with the natural process of learning as much as possible. Things like avoiding all memorization, or insisting on group work at all times, or actually not teaching.

This is not at all likely to produce the best results for our children.

On Teaching

Don John.

The essence of good teaching, if you stop and think about it, is not mysterious. It is obvious. You need three things: to entertain, to explain, and to help retain. Unfortunately, modern education schools ignore all three.

The biggest problem is the "entertain" part. It is obviously necessary—you need to be able to hold your audience's attention in order to get anywhere with them. And simply screaming "pay attention" is idiotic and an admission of incompetence. A great teacher is a great storyteller plus a stand-up comic, and if he or she can sing and dance, even better. St. John Bosco was a juggler and acrobat. Jesus made all his points in the form of stories, Confucius in aphorisms. Socrates played the fool, and Plato presented ideas in the form of plays. But this is a knack, a gift, a talent. It cannot be taught in an education school, and so it is ignored altogether.

By "explain," I mean the ability when the subject allows it to give concise, clear explanations. What could be more obviously fundamental to teaching? This again was essential to St. John Bosco's famously successful technique. Stands to reason: you need to know the goal in order to have a chance of reaching it. This, too, however, is not within the command of the average lector; the average person giving a ten minute explanation of anything is boring and confusing. Above all, it requires the ability oneself to reason well; which is no doubt why the teaching profession in the past has always been considered a proper occupation for the most intelligent among us, and given the respect this commanded.

Yet, remarkably, even making the attempt to do this is taboo in current teaching theory. Lecturing is out; no more "sage upon the stage." Why? Officially, because this is authoritarian; because the students are supposed to come up with their own reality, their own truths. But God help them if the reality they come up with is not the one the teacher expects. And in the meantime, have they learned anything, by merely saying what they already knew?

I think the true reason clear explanations are discouraged is because the typical individual who signs on to teachers' college is simply not intelligent and articulate enough to do it well; and this cannot be taught. Ergo, by default, it is best if they don't try; it just exposes their deficiency. But look at the popularity of TED Talks on the Internet, or of Glenn Beck's chalk talks on TV. These are lectures, and there is nothing folks like better than a good one. Public lectures used to be a major form of popular entertainment. 

Don Glenn

Finally, it is not enough to get the students' attention and tell them the thing so that they can understand it. They also have to remember it, or nothing has been accomplished. There is a vast technology of mnemonics, ways to remember effectively, that has been built up over millennia. Remarkably, none of it is taught in schools of education; in my experience, the average teacher does not even know what the word means. The current prescribed format for a “lesson plan” makes no provision for mnemonics or even simple repetition or review. The entire matter is ignored.

Or rather, not ignored. The current teaching is that memorization is bad. 

Why is it bad? Because it is not creative.

Perhaps it is true that memorization is not creative—although most cultures believe it is, that it creates new furniture in the soul. If so, so what? Does one good thing drive out all other good things? Isn't it a false alternative to suggest that we need to choose between remembering and creating? 

John Glenn

My secret suspicion is that memorization is really discounted in modern education schools for a different reason: because it is boring—for the teacher.

So those are my three ingredients for proper teaching: entertain, explain, and retain. Only the last can really be taught, but, to the extent that these things can be taught, they form the ancient discipline of rhetoric. That is surely the proper education for a prospective teacher.

But there is one more thing, more important than all these. A good teacher must love his students. Without this, there is nothing. This again is what Don Bosco taught.