For a long time, teachers taught knowledge that they had acquired to students who had not yet acquired it.
With the internet, we are no longer necessarily taught by teachers who are in a classroom with us, but we can easily search for, read up on, and learn stuff from people anywhere on the planet.
This is my first blog post that I’m writing just to test out the software. No-one has directly taught me how to do it, but I am indebted to the many talented people who have written fantastic articles on the internet describing how to set up blogs and websites.
Having said that though, I couldn’t have done anything without the ability to read, to write, and to do mathematics, and these things I learned from my teachers.
So, if I learned how to set up a website (and to make Science videos) without actually attending a class for these things, what role will there be for teachers in the future (beyond teaching the basics)? With the amount of information on the internet, do we need teachers anymore? Well, text books have been around at least since 1980 when I started high school (and I’m told even earlier, but who cares, right?), but my teachers were still an essential part of my education.
The way kids (and all of us) learn stuff has changed a lot (and it will continue to change a lot). The use of videos, for example, has exploded over the past 10 years because it is now so much easier to show them from a computer. A lot of teachers are using the Shedding Light videos to take care of the actual instructional side of things.
However, students still need great teachers to guide them, to encourage them, to set high standards, to help them to set goals, to give feedback, and to teach them the skills that they do not yet know that they will need in the future.
Interestingly, when my teachers taught me to read, to write, and to do maths, I did not realize just how useful those skills would be even decades later. A lot of what we learn is like that.
So, teachers are invaluable!