Touchstone of Knowledge

I think about teaching sometimes. I think about being lucky to have had some good teachers that helped me understand the world and sparked my thirst for knowledge. I've often wondered what makes some people better teachers than others, and I've often considered teaching. My teaching fantasies are just that, scenes where you transform young minds and catch them on fire with a yearning to learn.

I was thinking that the idea of teaching children in a classroom was similar to the teacher pouring knowledge from a container into the smaller containers of the children. I envisioned the teacher with a big urn of liquid and the children each with their little cups, the teacher walking around pouring the knowledge into the children's containers. The more I thought about this, them more I realized that it is a bad analogy. This makes knowledge to be a finite resource and students to be passive vessels. It breaks down when you consider that the teacher is not expending or giving away their knowledge, but sharing and multiplying it.

A better analogy would be to visualize a teacher with a glowing stone and when it touches student's dark stones, they light up. I like the magical flavor of the image. This is more like an ignition of knowledge inside children's minds, where they always had the potential for this knowledge. In this case, knowledge multiplies through education. It spreads out and takes root in a broader audience. In many ways this is what makes us human. When we look at animals, we marvel that they know how to hunt or care for their young through instinct. A certain amount of skills are probably a result of having a body and being hungry and following its natural urges. Culture and other useful skills are taught to the younger members of the species. For humans, this includes written language and such intangibles as ideas, which may not have a direct physical representation in the world.

I also thought of another analogy of the spreading of human knowledge. It is kind of like a brush fire spreading, as ideas ignite and spread. The direct example of this is how early man learned about making fire and taught this skill to other men. This wildfire analogy has an interesting contradiction in it, because fire is destructive and we think of knowledge as constructive. Fire used by man made life easier and gave them control over their environment.

In any case, knowledge should spread like wildfire, but care must be taken that it does not burn us.