MODALITIES OF TEACHING

TEACHING AS DIFFERENT FROM INDOCTRINATION, INSTRUCTION, CONDITIONING AND TRAINING

DICTIONARY MEANINGS

TEACHING: 

1. Impart knowledge to or instruct (someone) in how to do something, especially in a school or as part of a recognized programme.

• Give instructions in (a subject or skill)

• Cause to learn by example or experience

2. Advocate as a practice or principle.

INSTRUCTION:

1.A direction or order.

• (instructions) Law

directions to a solicitor, counsel or jury.

2. (instructions) detailed information about how something should be done.

3. Computing A code in a programme which defines and carries out an operation.

4. Education. 

INDOCTRINATION:

1. Causing someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically through repeated instruction.

2. archaic teach or instruct.

CONDITIONING:

1. Having a significant influence on.

• Training or accustoming to behave in a certain way.

[as adj. conditioned ] relating to or denoting automatic responses established by training to an ordinarily neutral stimulus.

2. Bring into the desired state for use. 

TRAINING:

1. Teaching (a person or animal) a skill or type of behavior through regular practice and instruction.

• Being taught in such a way

2. Make or become fit through a course of exercise and diet. 

TEACHING AND RELATED ACTIVITIES

• When one person imparts information or skill to another, it is common to describe the action as teaching.

• But not every way of bringing about learning in other counts as teaching, and not every act of teaching has a place within a programme of education.

• Philosophers of Education have analyzed the concept of Teaching in its generic sense and have attempted to distinguish educative teaching from related concepts such as Training, Conditioning and Indoctrination. 

• A central theme of these efforts have been to show that these related activities result in a defective form of learning because they fail to engage adequately the rational powers of students. 

TEACHING

• In its generic sense, Teaching denotes action undertaken with the intention of bringing about learning in another and is different from merely telling or showing how.

• Teaching , in fact, is a term which lacks well- defined boundaries. Teaching aims at learning and hence at knowledge, although, falsehoods can be taught and learned.

• Classifying an action as Teaching implies no judgments about the moral or educational worth of the content or about the methods employed.

• In its more distinctive sense, ‘Teaching’ is used to denote effort directed towards bringing about learning of a certain kind or quality—typically learning which is part of a programme of ‘education’.

• By ‘education’ in this context, is meant a special transformation of thought, feeling, and action distinct from mere socialization. 

• Often ‘education’ in this sense is understood as a process whose goal is the development of critical, reflective agents.

• It is in this context that ‘Teaching’ is commonly distinguished from related activities (such as Training, Conditioning and Indoctrination).

• Training, Conditioning and Indoctrination may also involve the intent to bring about learning, but of a kind or quality which is judged to be defective on a range of criteria from the standpoint of shared educational ideals.

TRAINING

• ‘Training’ has a more substantial area of overlap with ‘educative teaching’. In many contexts, ‘teaching’ can be substituted for ‘training’ without a change in meaning.

• The focus of ‘Training’ is on the development of skills, on knowing-how rather than on knowing-that.

• Sometimes, ‘training’ is reserved for use in the context of teaching of routine tasks which allow total mastery, but not always.

• When ‘ training’ does have a negative connotation by contrast with ‘educative teaching’, the focus is on learning which is narrow, inflexible, and uninformed by the point of the activity undertaken. 

• Example: ‘He has been merely trained rather than taught to think for himself’. 

• [Sometimes ‘drill’ is used as the negative term and ‘train’ as the positive one.]

• tasks which allow total mastery, but not always. 

• ‘Teaching’ someone a skill, on the other hand, requires developing the learner’s capacity to respond to the unexpected, to understand what he/she is doing and why, to be intelligent and reflective in the exercise of his/her skill.

• Such ‘Teaching’, therefore, involves the giving of reasons rather than (or in addition to) drill. 

CONDITIONING

• Conditioning is of two types– Classical and Operant. In Classical Conditioning, the reinforcer determines the kind of behavior, while in Operant Conditioning the occurrence of a response determines the kind of reinforcement an organism will get.

• Classical Conditioning is not compared with Teaching because in this type of conditioning an organism comes to elicit a response (naturally) and is not taught to do that!

• Normally, it is Operant Conditioning which is compared with Teaching because it simply seems to be a systematic form of training and hence teaching. 

• Common school practices such as giving rewards for good behavior can be described as setting up a situation in which a reinforcer(reward) depends upon the occurrence of a response( good behavior) [and that is the procedure for Operant Conditioning].

• This description of the situation implies nothing about how the stimulus (particular circumstances) brings about the response (good behavior) or why the frequency of the child’s behavior increases (except that it was given reward). 

• It seems possible, then, that a child’s behavior could be altered through conditioning without the child’s being consciously aware of the change or having any notion of why behaving in this way might be appropriate in the particular circumstances. 

• This makes it clear that the child in the above situation, does not behave because of any judgments she/he has made about what she/he ought to do. The child acts simply because of her/his conditioning!

• The process of Conditioning, therefore, seems to by-pass human rationality and is generally held to be unacceptable in a programme of education. 

• On the other hand, it has been argued that processes such as a person’s learning some fact by reading or hearing statements in its favor and evaluating the evidence (rational process) can be described as a process of Operant Conditioning. 

• If this is so, then educative teaching would not be incompatible with conditioning students but only with some ways of doing so. Thus ‘Conditioning’ (Operant) can be thought of as a possible cousin of ‘Teaching’. 

INDOCTRINATION

• The concept of ‘Indoctrination’ has received extensive treatment by philosophers of education. 

• ‘Indoctrination’ is sometimes mistaken for genuine education. Some have thought that ‘indoctrination’ is always to be avoided. Others have held that its use is inevitable (even if lamentable) with young children. 

• Thus the place of ‘indoctrination’ in a genuine programme of education is in doubt! 

• Etymology suggests that ‘indoctrination’ is connected with the teaching of doctrines.

• A doctrine may be defined as a system of beliefs that provides an explanation or interpretation of the world and indicates how humans ought morally to act in light of the general features of existence that the system has identified.

• A doctrine , as opposed to a Scientific Theory, contains assertions which are, in principle, not open to empirical investigation; are not known be true ; and it would be difficult to say what states of affairs would count for or against their truth. 

• Some have thought that any attempt to teach a doctrine (except in the sense of teaching a student what statements form part of the doctrine) is necessarily ‘indoctrination’. 

• Others, however, have left open the possibility that the content of a doctrine could be either educatively taught or indoctrinated depending upon the methods the instructor uses.

• ‘Indoctrinators’ are thought of as permitting no questions or expressions of doubt from the students. He /she uses methods which go beyond rational appeal, if necessary and misrepresents the weight of the evidence which is available. 

• In contrast, one who is educatively teaching tries to engage the reason of students, to encourage them to hold their beliefs on the basis of the available evidence, to subject their beliefs to appropriate tests, and to stand ready to revise their beliefs in light of new discoveries.

• In areas in which there are alternative points of view equally supported by the evidence, the ‘teacher’ must makes this known. 

• Some argue that when systematic distortion and irrational persuasion of this sort are in evidence, indoctrination is taking place regardless of the intention of the instructor.

• Others have claimed that, however, miseducative these methods are, the result is not indoctrination unless the instructor has certain special intentions.

• Self-conscious indoctrinators, it is generally agreed, aim at implanting beliefs within their students in such a way that the beliefs are immune to change. 

• They are interested in fixity of belief because of the connection the beliefs they are inculcating have with actions they are endeavoring to promote.

• Some have held, however, that instructors need not have such explicit intentions for a charge of indoctrination to stick. 

• For suppose that the worldview which forms the content of instruction is the predominant ideology of the society of which the school is a part. 

• The teachers, along with other members of the society, may have uncritically taken on these socially dominant beliefs and be transmitting them to students (either consciously or unconsciously) in good faith.

• The failure of teachers in scrutinizing these societal beliefs is appropriately labeled as ‘indoctrination’ by some. 

• In this case, the need to distinguish genuinely educative teaching from indoctrination is greatest. It is here that the self-awareness and independence of thought and action that education aims at is most crucial.

EDUCATIVE TEACHING

(The Concluding Remarks)

• The above discussion reveals that ‘educative teaching’ is a practice which engages the rational faculties of students and respects them as independent centers of thought and action. 

• ‘Educative teaching’ aims not only at encouraging beliefs which are supported by the evidence, but also at developing the power of students to gather the evidence and asses its adequacy for themselves. 

• This means that a programme of education must include the acquisition of the most reliable methods humans have developed for discovering the truth about themselves and the world.

• When teaching skills, the educative teacher (or educator) makes the students aware of the reasons for what they are doing and encourages them to be intelligent and reflective in the exercise of their skills. 

• Although the environment (and schools and teachers are part of that environment) may shape the behavior of students through Operant Conditioning, educative teachers desire students to act because of their perceptions of what they ought to do rather than merely because of their history of reinforcements.

• Educative teaching prepares students to develop their own rational life plans and act upon them.