But the future of education will remain impoverished unless it recovers an old truth: the best teacher is never only a worker in the knowledge economy. The best teacher is a maker of human beings and a nation builder.
FUNERALS have a way of stripping public language of its pretence. In the eulogy for a departed teacher, the usual phrases of condolence gave way to something more revealing: testimony.
A fellow colleague did not speak merely of a woman who taught lessons, marked books and kept registers.
He spoke of someone who counselled children, visited homes, defended the vulnerable and treated education as a moral vocation rather than a timetable. In death, she was remembered not only as a teacher, but as an institution – a legend.
That memory invites a harder question than nostalgia usually allows: what, exactly, has changed in the epistemology of teaching? In other words, what counts as knowledge in the classroom now, and what sort of human being is the teacher expected to be in relation to that knowledge?
