By Dan Linssen, Green Bay Gazette
Hundreds of years ago, before the printing press, knowledge was passed along verbally from person to person. At some point, humans began to optimize that process by passing fundamental information to multiple recipients at once. By early colonial America, we had career teachers responsible for passing on fundamental skills (think the “three ‘R’s”) to all of our kids. Their job was to confer their knowledge onto an assigned school of kids. In its most fundamental sense, teaching is imparting what the teacher knows. For most of our history, that has been the primary role of teachers. By definition, that limits the student’s learning to what the teacher knows and effectively can transmit. In contrast, learning is acquiring what you need to know to achieve your objective.
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