This, I think is a key point that Alan Kay brings up and Seymour Papert builds upon, in their testimony before the 1995 House Committee Hearing on Technology in Education, that teachers and schools need to be more humble about what they teach and focus more on how to model learning. I will come back to this clip in a later reflective post (I promise). They both agree here that what is important in a teacher is that they are good learners, not so much that they have extensive knowledge of their subjects. This concept flies in the face of what I believed when I started teaching eleven years ago but have come now to embrace as absolute truth about teaching, learning, and education. Curriculum, after all, is nothing more than a political weapon designed to elevate and highlight some while repressing others (see Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States) but metacognition and knowledge acquisition skills empower all who are taught them.
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That sums it up, doesn't it? We need teachers who are learners, who model the learning process to their students every day. We can't possibly teach a teacher everything that they need to know in 4 years of college. We need to guide them in the learning process so that they can be in a constant state of learning in the classroom.
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