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GOOD TEACHERS USE a wide variety of teaching methods. They know that students learn in different ways and so benefit from different approaches to teaching. Moreover, most students, whatever their style of learning, appreciate some variety in their lessons. School can too easily become a prolonged experience of being talked at.Teaching methods carry their own message. Students can learn that they do not know very much and even that they are stupid, that their job is to learn what their teachers put in front of them and that they must obey authority and follow orders. This can be done cruelly or humanely, but either way, the message is one of conformity and dependence. Alternatively, students can learn flat roof repair, that what they know matters, that they know more than they realize, that although there is much they do not know they are capable of learning it and that discussion, questioning and criticism are important parts of learning.

Depending on the teacher’s choice of teaching methods, students can learn that learning, and perhaps life itself, is a matter of competing against others, of second-guessing what people in authority expect (hence that frequent classroom question “Will this be on the test?”), that success means outsmarting others, that there are winners and losers, and that what matters is to be a winner. Or they can learn that learning means co-operating with others, that many heads are usually better than one, that learning means sharing ideas, offering one’s ideas for comment and criticism, that effort and persistence can pay off and that success is the result of hard work more than of native ability.

Consider the problem of teaching grade seven students about the ancient Greek city-state. The conventional approach is to walk students through the textbook, perhaps look for a story or two to add interest, show a filmstrip, assign questions. It is sometimes described as the transmission method of teaching. It can be done efficiently and, if done by a good teacher, can interest students. But its message to students is that here is something they do not know, but their teacher does, that everything they need to know is to be found in the textbook or the teacher’s notes, that there are no unanswered questions or unsolved puzzles, that they do not have to concern themselves with how we know anything at all about ancient Greece or with the deeper question of why they have to study the topic at all, that what they already know has nothing to do with school, and that to learn something means to be able to answer somebody else’s questions.