The ability to teach is remarkable, singular knowledge. Labelling it as an art or a craft risks missing what’s distinctive about it.
Teaching does share many similarities with arts and crafts. It’s often described as such to distinguish it from what people call “an exact science”, which teaching certainly isn’t.
Arts and crafts generally require technical knowledge, including mastery of techniques and good judgement. Someone who has mastered the art of medicine, for example, is a master of diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease.
Similarly, someone who has mastered teaching has mastered the techniques of questioning, explaining, cultivating skills and so on. So it’s fair to call teaching technical.
Teaching: more than creativity
As well as knowing the techniques, arts and crafts also involve knowing when, where, how and why these should be employed. This is certainly also true of teaching: a technique that educates in one context might confuse in another.
Too much information here is insufficient there. What’s too provocative for one is too comforting for another. The teacher requires experience and wisdom to judge what’s right in each context.
And because technical knowledge requires experience, it’s not reducible to facts. Just as pianists, potters and doctors must practise their skills, so must teachers. The path to knowledge is made by walking it.
However, despite these obvious kinships, there’s something unique about teaching know-how that is neither art nor craft.
Aristotle distinguishes between technical knowledge of creating stuff, for example, sculpture, carpentry or painting (roughly speaking, mastery of crafts) and knowledge of doing or performing, for example, the art of medicine or the performing arts (roughly speaking, mastery of arts).
But neither creating nor performing fully describes teaching.
Of course, teachers do create things: resources, plans and displays. But these aren’t our primary concerns, and we can teach without creating.
The ultimate performance?
Similarly, there may be an element of performance in one’s teaching, but we can imagine a teacher performing well, without anyone learning anything. In one sense, this teacher didn’t teach at all, never mind well. In contrast, a surgeon can perform surgery well, even if the patient dies.
Teaching has a recursive aspect: it is the ability to cultivate ability in another, and just as the nascent teacher must practise their techniques, so must the pupil practise what they’ve learned.
Teaching, thus, cannot be reduced to performance because, unlike with arts, teaching is necessarily a joint venture between the person carrying out the activity and the person to (or for) whom the activity is being carried out. For education to occur, the teacher and the pupil must work towards the same goal. The pupil must try.
In contrast, a surgeon can perform surgery without the patient trying to heal. A doctor can treat a patient without the patient making any effort (although often education of a patient is part of treatment, which only serves to highlight the distinction between performance and education). Dancers are still dancing whether or not the audience is paying attention.
But if no one is learning, a teacher is not teaching, except in a very narrow - merely performative - sense.
Collaboration is a valuable part of medicine, sport, carpentry or any art or craft, but education know-how is unique among technical abilities in that it’s defined by it, by shared goals, it is necessarily a communal activity.
Hence the quintessential educational activity is not so much giving answers, as asking questions.
Bernard Andrews is a secondary school philosophy teacher
