What is teaching?

I've been reading a book called How Woke Won by Joanna Williams, and I wanted to respond to part of it:

Curriculum planners seek to second guess the next generation of workplace skills and, because this is impossible, they get children to ‘learn how to learn’. Teachers are no longer presented as a source of knowledge but as learners themselves, just like their pupils. And if teachers have no special knowledge to impart, they have little basis to command respect. Unlike passing on knowledge, learning to learn is morally and intellectually vacuous. This vacuum has been filled by woke. Given woke is the dominant outlook of teachers today, it is what they automatically reach for. This is not to say that teachers are so in thrall to identity politics that they no longer see subject knowledge as important. Rather, it is because cultivating subject knowledge is no longer seen as an end in itself that woke values are invited in to lend a sense of purpose to education. (Williams, Joanna. How Woke Won (p. 103). John Wilkes Publishing. Kindle Edition.)

I wanted to respond to this passage, not to defend 'woke', but to defend modern teaching practices. I strongly disagree that 'learning to learn' is vacuous. I think it's the single most important thing we can teach kids and that has always been the case. It's true that, now more than ever, we can't predict what skills students will need in the future. That's why it's so important to teach them to learn, and equip them with transferable skills, rather than just imparting 'knowledge' to them. 

The idea that the teacher is the authoritative source of knowledge on a particular subject and it's their job to convey that exact knowledge to students, is outdated. To be useful, your knowledge needs to be your own. Take history for example. The traditional approach was to learn a lot of dates and events - a lot of information. The teacher had all that information and they shared it with the students and the students memorized it and repeated it back in assessments as best they could. But that doesn't lead to real understanding, and it's not useful. Why do we learn history? Surely it's so that we can learn about and learn to think and communicate about important issues. 

This same logic applies to higher education as well. If you do a law degree, you're not meant to learn all the cases and statutes. You can't, and in any case, the law would have changed by the time you finish your degree. So, you learn some cases and you learn major trends, and most importantly, you learn how to ascertain what the current law is and you learn how to reason like a lawyer. The most powerful skill you are equipped with is how to learn. Like in any profession, when you finish your formal education and you start working in your field, it's like starting over. You have to get to know how all the theory you've learned works in the real world. And that's where the skills you've learned come into play. 

Also - on the point about teachers being learners themselves - absolutely! As a teacher, tutor and trainer, I really embrace the idea that I am a learner myself, just like my students. I think the best teachers are excited about learning and they engage in learning with their students. They aren't above their students, imparting wisdom to them like some kind of oracle. 

Teachers should be experts in their field, but good teachers don't command respect because of the weight of all their knowledge. They command respect because of the combination of the expertise they have about their subject(s) and their ability to teach those subjects effectively. 

Teaching is a great art. I think teachers should get paid more than they do because they do one of the most important jobs there is.