Lecture 1

The Moral Context of Teaching and Learning

Introduction:

    All teaching, and the learning that results, is conducted in a moral context. There are basic moral and ethical assumptions that form the foundation of teaching and learning. These assumptions are explored in this lecture. Second, all learning and teaching occurs within a cultural context. Such contexts include moral and ethical influences that are inescapable. Clues to seeing and understanding some of the moral influences of a particular culture are discussed.

Assumptions about teaching and learning:

    The teacher/learner relationship is a particular relationship based on a value. Something that the teacher knows is valued by the learner. Furthermore, the learner believes that the teacher has the skill and desire to share that valuable knowledge. While these basic assumptions of teaching and learning are patently obvious, they are also obscured in many settings.

    For example, compulsory education obscures the value of the teacher’s knowledge for the learner. Compulsory education requires children of a certain age to participate in a school experience. Compulsory attendance shows the value that society puts on education, but doesn’t necessarily put the responsibility for valuing the learning on the student. Individual students may not value the education provided for them. As a result, they are likely to be inattentive and prone to misbehave. Certainly, it is the students who don’t want to be in school that cause the most problems for their teachers!

    Society has also co-opted the regulation of teaching and teachers. Most countries have rather explicit and rigid rules and regulations for the certification of teachers. Societal certification of teachers, often through laws or official regulations, is an attempt to insure that all teachers who are employed have, first, the information society values, and second, the desire and skills to share the information. While this is probably done with the best of intentions, one of the unintended effects is to obscure the basic value that the learner puts on the teacher’s skill.

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    Thus, the basic teacher/learner relationship is a relationship of respect based on the learner’s value of the teacher’s knowledge and skill. That relationship is often obscured as responsibility for parts of the value of the learners’ participation and the teachers’ skills are assumed by society at large rather than remaining the responsibility of the learner.

The cultural context of teaching and learning:

Teaching of some sort is actually a universal value of all cultures. No culture can survive more than one generation unless it has a way of transmitting itself to the new generation. Furthermore, humans are helpless at birth. Because of their biological nature, they are not capable of independence at birth. These two forces coincide to assure that some form of education and nurture are provided. That education is culturally situated.

    Perceiving one’s own culture is often a difficult task! Unless one is aware at some level that not all people solve the basic human questions of food, shelter, and relationship in the same way, it is easy to assume that the way that an individual knows is the only way! Actually, one of the values of education is that through various communication media, one can transcend their own existential “thrownness” and experience, however vicariously, the life of another time and place. For example, although I grew up on the central plains of North America during the 1960’s and never even saw the ocean until around the age of 14, by reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville, I could enter and understand to some extent the life of a nineteenth century whaler! I could learn what they ate. I could see the sights they saw. I could struggle with them against their own values of leadership against a captain who was obsessed. Likewise, I could enter the mind of a Russian through an English translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, learning much about Russian culture as I explored my own mind.

    This leads us to a central paradox of education. Education, especially formal education, is both a product of and a way to escape our culture. Formed in its structure from elements of each culture, designed at least in part, to pass on the essentials of each culture to the next generation, education is undoubtedly a product of a specific culture. At the same time, education gives us the skills and the tools as well as the content necessary to transcend our cultural provincialism and take the perspective of another time and place. Through communication tools provided most frequently through education, we can learn, at least to some small extent, how people in other cultures eat, stay warm, and relate to others.

Conclusion:

    The whole idea of teaching and learning is based on assumptions that the teacher knows something that the learner values and furthermore, can help the learner obtain the knowledge and/or skill in question. Education is also a product of a culture. Each culture must have some system of nurturing human infants to independence and of acculturating individuals into the culture. Even as a product of a culture, education can help us transcend the culture. As we learn to communicate, we learn to hear the voice of people from other times, places, and cultures. Through this listening, we can learn to see our own culture more clearly as well as its impact on our teaching and learning.

Discussion questions:

1. What responsibility does an individual learner have toward a teacher?
2. What responsibility does an individual teacher have toward a learner?
3. How have you been impacted by other times and places through literature, music, or other media? Which media seem to impact you most powerfully?
4. What have you learned about your own culture through a vicarious experience of another culture?
5. Is this content important to a teacher or a student? Why?

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