Do we need teachers?
This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)
Communication in learning
In free learning, there is no need for a teacher (for clarity, see the definition of a "teacher").
In free learning, one-on-one tutors are optional as well. All human beings need to interact with other humans. That interaction is necessary to satisfy inborn social needs. It is needed for socialization, and efficient learning. Human communication is one of the most efficient ways of optimizing the learning trajectory. For that reason, in the ideal case, a child should grow in rich environments with the possibility of interacting with other individuals from varied walks of life, different ages, different ability, different personality, different area of expertise, etc. It is always great to have a guru or a role model, e.g. in one's own parents, in a rock-star of science, or in a media personality. However, the ages old concept of a teacher is gradually becoming obsolete.
Perfect tutor
Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with an idea of a perfect guardian in Emile. To this day, many educators believe that a perfect tutor is an optimum solution for a child (see: Progressive education). However, Rousseau's ideas belong to the rustic settings of the preindustrial world. In modern era, in which thousands of knowledgeable individuals are available at the click of a button, every child can find her own optimum mix of friends and advisors in real life and in virtual life.
Good will, warmth and love, are essential components of healthy and rich interaction between adults and children. This factor adds one more advantage of loving parents as efficient communicators, gurus, and role models. Good parents might then be the best teachers in the ideal world. It is a pity that many parents have already been destroyed by the way we organize society, by schooling, or by their own domestic situation, including their own parents.
This vicious cycle must break. Incremental cultural and behavioral progress has an intergenerational nature.
Value of an expert
I have been free to learn on my own as of 1990. My job is to improve learning. For that reason, I am also free to explore all areas of interest, because free learning is actually part of my work. In theory, I carry very little baggage of bad school habits. Despite all that unconstrained learning though, for me, there is no substitute for an interaction with a human expert. If I want to buy an electronic device, a quick interaction with a human expert can be a satisfactory substitute for hours of googling. This is particularly important in areas where I do not plan to acquire much of my own expertise. For example, some aspects of technology are new today and obsolete tomorrow. I prefer to learn things that work in the long-term. For a 5-year-old kid, nearly all adults are experts in one area or another. The kid does not need a teacher. All he needs is free access to warm and open adults. For this, we may need some cultural change. These days, an adult offering advice to a child may be viewed with suspicion. We must return to the old good adage: it takes a village to raise a child.
Optimum adaptation
Effective learning is self-paced and self-directed. The value of a teacher in content delivery is negligible. In modern world, proliferation of methods of delivery eliminates the need for a man standing in front of a classroom (see: Direct instruction). The value of teachers and tutors is limited to communication, which should ideally have an interactive, bidirectional, one-to-one form. The value of the interaction is highest if the student chooses his interactive experts, and the timing of the interaction. Due to the high cost of expert time, the most efficient way of access to experts in via on-line queuing. In real life, any interaction with adults would do. As children adapt to their environments, their developmental trajectory will reflect the kind of people they interact with. However, the power of online education provides all necessary ingredients of diversification. This way, a child from a small poor village may dream of working for NASA or Space X or having his own rocket company. In the ideal world, each expert in each field should always be open to questions from the world, of which questions from young audiences might be most important and most inspiring.
On-line wisdom
These days, a 10-year-old will get far better answers to his questions from Google than he can get from his teacher (see: How do giraffes sleep?). Even the best teacher cannot compete in terms of sheer factual knowledge. On the football field, I see more and more kids come in with their smartphones. If I puzzle them with questions in physics or chemistry, they do not even blink to think about their parents or teachers. They pull out the phone and google. More often than not, they get all answers they need. Self-directed learning is easier than ever. See: Sugata Mitra experiment.
In the advent of artificial intelligence and global access to knowledge, the role of a teacher keeps waning. Children should look up to the adult world mostly for friendly advise and wisdom.
Paradox of the semantic distance
The school system generates the illusion that a teacher is indispensable. As schools push kids too hard, there is usually a big semantic distance between a student and the teacher to traverse. This way teachers know far more than kids need to learn in their class. This gives a teacher a sense of omniscience: "without me, how would they … ?". The problem is that students need to slow down, and advance at their own pace. The volume of learning should be reduced as compared with the volume set by the curriculum. Excessive demands push for asemantic learning due to the overly long semantic distances. Through the unavoidable coercion, even the best teachers can contribute to the hate of learning. The illusion of good learning in heavy curriculum is hard to notice. Most of knowledge becomes forgotten within weeks. The speed of forgetting is accelerated due to heavy interference in the wake of asemantic learning.
School is like a greedy deforestation machine that boasts of heavy yields in wood with no attention paid to the fact that most of the product rots in the field.
Transition period
Teaching causes harm by the fact that once children start relying on direct instruction, they unlearn to rely on themselves! Ivan Illich noticed that the main lesson School teaches is the need to be taught. Being taught and helpless becomes a habit.
All teachers should take comfort in the fact that their role is still important. Once we push kids through the first 2-4 years of schooling, they quickly lose their self-learning capabilities. Many of those kids will need teachers for years to come. Experience of democratic schools shows that kids needs months or years to effectively transition from passive schooling to free learning. See: Education counteracts evolution.