Learning+and+Teaching

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 * Learning and Teaching**, by Michael Oakeshott


 * Summary: Michael Oakeshott opens this chapter by discussing how learning is more than knowing; it is about understanding and a desire to understand, qualities unique to being human. While he recognizes the role of the pupil, his focus is upon the role of the teacher and the work of teaching. The teacher takes on the role as the model or agent of civilization. It is his role to initiate the pupil into achieving or succeeding his inheritance and collectively students are taking on the common inheritance, or the world as a whole.**
 * Oakeshott describes the importance of the relationship between teacher and pupil as paramount to a pupil making the most of himself. In doing so the teacher is not simply passing on skills that will make his students the most ‘successful’ in life, it is about the student being able to see more than what is just currently applicable.**
 * Oakeshott distinguishes two parts of passing on knowledge from teacher to pupil; one is information and the other judgment. Information is about skills and facts; this is the explicit work that teachers pass on on a daily basis, received by the student on authority. Facts are not a matter of opinion or open to debate. Information may be further broken down into its ‘grammar’ or the rules of information and ‘principle’ or the performance of explaining information. While all knowledge has a component or components of information, there is more to it than that, there is judgment. While information is about the rules and the explicit, judgment is about the implicit and not about the formation of rules. Judgment may be used to distinguish the knowing what from the knowing how. It takes us beyond the rules of grammar into writing works or art or literature.**
 * After defining the role of the teacher and his responsibility as the job to initiate the pupil into the components of knowledge, he then concerns himself with how it is to be done. He suggests that the components are inseparable yet are not communicated in the same manner. A teacher instructs information and imparts judgment. The teacher must decide what information is to be passed on, organize the information so it is more easily learned, place it in order and give the students the skills to use the information. This immediately leads to what Oakeshott has referred to as judgment. Judgment is about being able to understand, to explain and to think.**
 * Oakeshott is now getting to the heart of what he considers judgment to be and how he sees it as being imparted. It is a ‘by-product’ of acquiring information and has to do with the character of what has to be imparted. It is the ability to use information, not simply that the information has a use, it is to enjoy the ‘intellectual virtues’.**
 * Oakeshott finishes by saying that the best way to impart knowledge in the complete sense of the word is for the teacher to lead by example; be interested in the intellectual pursuits for their own sakes, be interested in the students and their well being and to show and demonstrate good character through “patience, economy, elegance and style.”**


 * Key Passages**

Learning: The comprehensive engagement in which we come to know ourselves and the world around us.
 * Key Terminology:**

Pupil: The counterpart to a teacher. More specifically, the recipient of a teachers particularities. Pupil are initiated into the world of human achievement.

Teaching: Teaching is the deliberate and intentional initiation of a pupil into the world of human achievement, or into some part of it.

The self: The self is a historically based personality who reconizes himself amongst the world of human achievements.

Skill: A collection of physical movements towards an end.

Ability: What we know and make use of to apply to our skills. When concerned with a task, our abilities concern ourselves with our performance and mental opperation of our skill towards the given task.

Information: Facts, specific intellectual artifacts that are impersonal. Most of it is accepted on authority.

Judgement: Tacit or implicit component of knowledge, the ingredient which is not merely unspecified in prpositions but is unspecifiable in propositions. It is the component of knowledge which does not appear in the forms of rules and which, therefore, cannot be resolved into information or itemized in the manner characteristic of information.


 * Discussion Guiding Questions:**

What are your thoughts on Oakeshott's concept of human inheritance? Do you agree that "succeeding" the inheritance is what learning is about? In what ways?

Oakeshott writes about the partnership between teacher and pupil and the relationship between teaching and learning (pages 36, 37). What do you think Oakeshott's thoughts would be regarding peer scaffolding, group work, and collaboration, common practices in classrooms today? Can students teach and learn from each other?

What are Oakeshott's ideas regarding information and judgment and their relation to teaching and learning? How are they communicated? In what ways do you see this being done in classrooms today?

As we pondered briefly in class, what would a class based on Oakeshott's ideas look like?