On Teachers: Beyond “Good” and “Bad” | Dissident Voice

On Teachers: Beyond “Good” and “Bad” | Dissident Voice:

On Teachers: Beyond “Good” and “Bad”

by Tolu Olorunda

The teacher must have a genuine interest in mental activity on his own account, a love of knowledge that unconsciously animates his teaching.
—John Dewey¹

[T]eachers cannot follow the medieval tradition of detached withdrawal from the world. … [They] cannot be pedants or dilettantes, they cannot be mere technicians and higher artisans, they have got to be social statesmen and statesmen of high order.
—W.E.B. Du Bois²

Social relations in the classroom that glorify the teacher as the expert, the dispenser of knowledge, end up crippling student imagination and creativity; in addition, such approaches teach students more about the legitimacy of passivity, than about the need to examine critically the lives