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