Cogito Ergo Sum

Teaching isn't just about facts. To take a rather hackneyed and frankly strained analogy of building a house; the finished edifice is something approximating to a body of knowledge, the bricks are the 'facts' that are bound together to form that edifice. However, the real knowledge that has to be gained through being taught lies in the understanding of how those bricks are made and the process by which they are bound together to form the whole. Without that background understanding we have no edifice at all. We can't build if we don't know how to make bricks [substitute your construction materials of choice: I prefer bricks; see blog posts passim on this topic], and even if there is a Desert Island Discs Luxury endless supply of magic bricks, if you don't understand mortar, how to make it and how to apply it; you still haven't got knowledge: you merely have facts.

Teaching is about showing both the gaps between, and the relationships between, facts. Teaching is about imparting method. Teaching is guidance, not instruction. To teach is to offer alternatives. To teach is to demonstrate the cause and effects of those alternatives: to show that not all ideas about facts are the same; that they have different influences and outcomes and consequences. Facts are just the building blocks of knowledge, after all: they are real, they are concrete entities and there is no such thing as an 'alternate fact'; but without a methodology to organise and make sense of these basic building blocks you simply have a pile of Trumpian bricks: utterly fucking useless, except as weapons in a fight. A good teacher teaches you how to learn for yourself. A bad teacher simply wants you to have total recall of a set roster of facts to be tested on examination. A truly free-thinking individual is one who has the tools to learn and discriminate the wheat from the chaff.

Here in North Wales, there is a strong tradition of communal debate and self-education: we don't need social media to dilute and destroy that tradition. The slate quarries here had their cabans; the gathering places for the workmen to eat, talk and sing: places where knowledge and the histories of that knowledge were passed down from generation to generation. We even funded and built our own University off the back of that self-education, in order to ensure that future generations would benefit from their own self-acquired knowledge. Those outside of Wales - and a good few this side of the Dyke, these days, no doubt - would do well to heed that example as the wider world progresses further towards the populist precipice of ignorance and inevitable disenfranchisement. The future is in the hands of the good teachers, methinks...