It’s easy – and common, I think – to think of education as the teacher giving a gift to their students. You have something valuable – knowledge, or a skill – and you give (something of) that to your students. Or you try to, in any case. You give back. Or you hand on what you yourself received when you were a student, or a novice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This looks like a very positive view of education. And I don’t know whether I think that there is always<\/em> something wrong with it. But it is not how I want to view and do education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Freire’s terms, education as gift-giving is humanitarian, not humanist. In terms of Sadie’s grandmother (in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow<\/em> by Gabrielle Zevin), it’s charity, not friendship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even though the image of giving a gift is positive and full of good intentions, it is hierarchical. Authoritarian, even. It’s a variation on the ‘banking’ model of education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is education an act of friendship? Of love? Perhaps, in a general fellow-feeling-with-other-humans kind of way. We could say it’s an act of fellowship. Or solidarity? In any case, education should be a collaboration, a dialogue, an encounter. For this, it needs to not be hierarchical. Or as non-hierarchical as you can manage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s easy – and common, I think – to think of education as the teacher giving a gift to their students. You have something valuable – knowledge, or a skill – and you give (something of) that to your students. Or you try to, in any case. You give back. Or you hand on what … Continue reading Teaching as gift-giving<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[27,13],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","tag-critical-pedagogy","tag-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobvanvliet.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}