Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

left unimpressed.’ Across the second and third quarters in 2009, the bank made over $100 million a day on a staggering 82 separate days and is already sitting on $16.7 billion for ‘pay and compensation’.
    One of the reasons I like working with young people in the whole
Philosophy for Children
area is that it allows us to explore issues to do with ethics and morality in a way that otherwise may not happen. I’m not teaching them what to think, nor preaching to them some religious edict of ‘Thou shalts’ and ‘Thou shall nots’, rather I am encouraging them to dig deeper than the simple, ‘If I do that, I’ll get this’ mechanistic view of the world, whether the ‘this’ is exam success, a new pair of Nikes or world domination.
    As philosopher Ayn Rand put it in
The Fountainhead
:
    Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. 6
    (Rand 1961)
    Mengele said, towards the end of his life, that he didn’t do anything wrong. The ‘apology’ from Goldman Sachs is matched by its ‘but didn’twe do well’ tone. Is your job to teach children to pass exams? Or is it to teach children to think and, from there, grow as morally sound and decent people who are educated to know right from wrong and use their education accordingly?
    Your answer to that question will determine what sort of society your grandchildren grow up in.

Chapter 21
Is yours a teaching school or a learning school?
    ‘Is yours a teaching school or a learning school?’ is a question I have been putting to teachers for many years now.
    And it is a question you need to be able to answer.
    I know I can teach for a week without anyone necessarily learning anything. I also know that not everything I teach gets learned nor is everything that gets learned what I’ve taught. But when you make that shift from teaching to learning it changes everything. Your job isn’t to teach them. Your job is that they learn. As German philosopher Heidegger once wrote, ‘Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn.’ 1 Now, combine that shift in emphasis with some of the other innovations and insights I have been trying to share with you in this book and I hope you will be able to see a real opportunity to change the nature of teaching and learning in the twenty-first century.
    For many years, the deal in the classroom, broadly speaking, was, I will teach you and the extent to which you either ‘get’ or ‘don’t get’ it, that, then, is the measure of your academic ability. I have fulfilled my part of the bargain in teaching you. Learning what I taught you was your part of the bargain. For me, this is like the doctor giving me one medicine in order to try and heal me and, if it doesn’t work, blaming me as she had ‘done her bit’. It’s what Howard Gardner of multiple intelligences theory, calls ‘single-chance education’ (Gardner 1983). You have just the one fleeting opportunity to jump on the knowledge train as it passes through the room and all must enter through the same door.
    When you shift your purpose in the classroom from teaching to making sure the child learns, you realize that this is no longer adequate. Your doctor’s job is not to give you medicine, it is to make you better. You would go back to the doctor and ask for an alternative drug if the symptoms persisted. Equally you now need to offer your children an alternative means for learning what needs to be learned.
    And by that I don’t mean just teaching things the same way but louder. Or slower. Or more often.
    What this new model calls for is ‘multiple-chance education’ (Gardner 1993) where students can access the information in a variety of ways that will allow them the opportunity to play to their strengths and, also, work on their weaknesses. Such variety of approach – and the watchword here genuinely is ‘variety’; after all, it’s hard to hit every student all of the time – cuts across not just how you offer opportunities for learning in your classroom but the nature of the classroom and even the school day as we shall see in chapter 22 .
    What’s more, as part of being a ‘learning school’, it is important that you teach children
how
to learn. This will sound self-evident to many of the teachers reading this book, but it wasn’t always the case. The whole idea of ‘Learn to Learn’ seems to be a relatively new phenomenon, at least on a widespread scale. (In the