Lecturing as a substitute to teaching makes minds inert and sterile

12 October, 2012

Despite the fact that both rote-learning and mere acquisition of sterile information are harmful ideas in education, lecturing continues to be the most popular method of teaching in most schools and colleges. Umpteen times, research and experiences of good teachers have proved that too much of lecturing as a substitute to teaching makes the minds of pupils inert and sterile.

VERY OFTEN, teachers transmit information to students who are made to act as passive recipients in the name of discipline. There is a need to combat this view that knowledge needs to be stored into various compartments of students’ minds through mechanical repetition of information.

Mere acquisition of knowledge, without understanding and a sense of value is of no use both to the individual and society. In most educational institutions we are teaching the subject matter or content and not educating students by empowering them through construction of knowledge and mastery over the processes of learning.

It is a matter of great concern that mere plastering of facts and figures of various subjects on the minds of students is being done in most institutions. Unfortunately, teachers are mistaking information imparting as teaching and students' acquisition of information as learning.

Some of the most common voiced concerns about the current teaching method in the classroom go as follows.

- The main issue in education is how to use the knowledge and information for making students think; to respond with sensitivity to others; and to develop a sense of values among them.

- The subject matter must provide food for the mind, i.e., thinking, imagining, expressing, modifying, etc., which is not being done in educational institutions.

- Good teaching promotes the activity of the mind; bad teaching is mechanical and lifeless.

- Intolerant use of abstractions mechanically in teaching is the major vice of the intellect. In teaching, a sense of values, sensitivity and the right personal attitudes are equally important.

- Questioning and dialoguing have a special value, they train the mind. A teacher’s question can play on a child’s mind spurring it to become independent, enterprising and perhaps creative.

- Knowledge is not the sole end of teaching; because it is that students master their subjects with understanding and utilize knowledge through application which matters.

- It requires a good deal of faith ad hard work to put information in the second place and learning in the first, to have patience to let the student's mind grow through thinking and understanding.

- Even so called good teachers are more concerned with what the students must know and how their faculties must be trained rather than pupils’ sense of values and their knowledge of good and evil.

All in all, under the present system of education, students are being made to cram information and are not educated. The test of a successful education is not the amount of knowledge take-away from the educational institutions but their appetite to knowledge and awakened capacity to learn. And, this not happening in educational institutions despite the latest reform called 'continuous and comprehensive evaluation'.