Is Teaching a Skill?David Carr University of Edinburgh Teaching and Education We may start with some fairly uncontroversial differences between education and teaching. First, usage supports regarding teaching, but not education, as a kind of activity. We might say: "please do not interrupt me while I'm teaching," but it seems odd to say: "not now while I'm educating." Teaching is also characterizable as an intentional activity; it is undertaken with the purpose of bringing about learning, which is why we can barely grasp what it is to teach in advance of some idea of what it is to learn. In this connection, it is worth noting that the surface grammar of pedagogical usage can be misleading. For example, we speak of X teaching Y, where Y is not infrequently ambiguous between persons and topics. Thus, we talk indifferently either of Mr. Smith teaching mathematics or of Miss Jones teaching Sarah or 4B, which can court such uncritical slogans as "one teaches children not subjects" (or vice versa). Such temptations are more easily resisted, however, once one grasps that the proper logical form of statements about teaching is better captured by "X teaches Y to Z": that, in short, instruction is invariably a matter of teaching something to someone.
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