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Latest Post: July 21, 2010 at 4:48 PM
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Why do people like to teach?

I want to immediately distinguish it from wanting to help people as I think it is very different. People don't necessarily care much in the world to help anybody, but still, people love to teach. Why then?
What do you like in teaching?


People like to teach for many reasons, I can try and point out some of the more obvious ones.

1. The need to exercise authority over others, to be admired by others. Standing in front of an audience of students and bestowing knowledge upon them can be intoxicating. Even if you just transfer knowledge without adding anything new to it, which is the case with most teachers, the fact that people are seriously writing down what you're saying flatters the ego, and you can easily forget that you're just a medium, you feel like the creator of that knowledge.

2. There is an act of creation in teaching, in the way that Socrates defined creation in the Symposium: not engendering others, but engendering ideas in others.

3. Teaching is the best way to learn. In order to efficiently transfer your knowledge, you have to organize it. And then, while preparing for giving a lecture or a lesson, you realize how fuzzy and missing it actually is, and you try to clarify it to yourself, fill all the pores. And then there is the act of speaking, of repeating, which solidifies it. So the only subjects I can really say I understand are the ones I taught to others.


I like to teach in order to shape minds into being responsible, caring, open-minded and creative. 

Neil is about right: "2. There is an act of creation in teaching, in the way that Socrates defined creation in the Symposium: not engendering others, but engendering ideas in others."


Interesting. I would say there is no teaching, there is just communication, communication as an evolutionary flow, and you can choose a setting. A very special setting is that play, where you have the role of the teaching one and the other side has to act as the learning one. Actually this is an interesting game about dominance and power and it is always not clear who is improving more in the end. To make the decision to play the role of a teacher means usually you need money or you need some external structure to give you a certain, superior social status. To keep this, you have to weaken the position of the persons you are teaching, you have to make them to trust more in methods and authority than in themselves and what they are interested in. A book i appreciated very much in this context is "The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation" by the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere.

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