I once had a student tell me that she really liked my teaching style that it was very informative, entertaining, and engaging; however, she said, "You really didn't teach us how to write."
I responded by saying, "95% of it is your job. As teacher, I merely encourage, package and summarize knowledge; students do the rest."
What is often misunderstood by the average consumer of education is the teacher's or institution's level of involvement in the student's learning or acquisition of knowledge. Institutions (k-12 and college / university) certainly are responsible for distributing knowledge, but teachers, considering the teacher to student ratio, don't have the time to sit down with each student to ensure success. I remember the majority of my professors in college had office hours but rarely encouraged us to drop by; after all, they were extremely busy.
This is the sad truth, especially for high school teachers who generally have over 100 students, daily lesson plans, meetings to attend, 100s of papers to grade (I estimate that I read 5,000 pages / semester as a college professor) and a life to live if there's any time left over. During the school year, for the dedicated teacher, that doesn't happen often. Consider that 3 out of 5 teachers use teaching as a stepping stone to other careers, you can see the pressure, work, and low pay pushing most to avoid the profession.
Regardless, this is not about the teaching profession per say, but rather about the greater need to teach students to be self-accountable for their education during their school years and certainly after. For what is a student to do in today's economy that demands he or she to be prepared for 3 to 5 careers (some experts say as much as 10 career changes in one's working years), go back to college every five to six years for another degree?
No, of course not.
It has always been true that the greatest performers have been self-taught. Those who perform at peak levels in the various disciplines certainly have coaches, attend seminars and training classes, engage in master mind groups, but ultimately the majority of insight and understanding comes from the hours put in by the individual. Once again, teachers and institutions are there to group and summarize knowledge for ease of ingestion and to inspire and motivate, but the brunt of the work comes down to that of the student.
And shouldn't it be that way?
Consider that on average half of our existence, if not more, we are working. And it is imperative that we keep our skills up to date and that we continue to gain knowledge, skills and attitudes--two things that are vital to success that are missing in the education of most coming from formal more knowledge and theory based systems. But as a counter point, many of the business gurus I learn from and work with often refer to avoiding academics, for they are good at theory but lack practical knowledge, especially if they have little to no hands-on business experience. Being an academic, I too see the problem. Oftentimes academics go too deep down a sliver of a niche, entertained and enraptured by theory that is often not practical, vague and esoteric and difficult to decipher never mind apply to the real world. Consider Steven Hawking's (our modern day Einstein) remarks about abstract physics; he stated that many of the theories of such scientists are based more in fantasy than fact.
Getting back to the issue at hand, however, students have always needed to learn how to learn, think, analyze and synthesize acquired knowledge with personal experience and that of others, infer, and deduce, but such skills are becoming a lost art. It is not emphasized in school and, unfortunately, too infrequently emphasized in colleges and universities.
Some of our greatest thinkers learned how to think, observe, analyze, infer, deduce, synthesize the majority of time via their own efforts: Benjamin Franklin, Da Vinci, Abraham Lincoln, Einstein. However, one does not need to be a genius or leader of considerable presense to use such skills, but in today's competitive global job market, along with high cost of living and dwindling savings rates, more than ever students must learn how to be self-educating for their sakes and the sake of a healthy nation, even world.
