Knowledge and teaching

The paper addresses a major fissure in the sociology of knowledge with respect to the theories of knowledge which inform teaching and learning. Instructional teaching, or ‘teaching knowledge to the child’, is compared to facilitation teaching, the ‘teaching the child’ approach to show the extent to which their differences are the result of very different understandings of how knowledge is constituted. In turn, these understandings about knowledge are implicated in major differences about the purpose that education serves in modern society. It is argued that the link between the way knowledge is structured and the way it is organised for teaching justifies instructional teaching as the more effective way to develop students’ learning. This learning is demonstrated in the subject mastery acquired as students connect propositional knowledge to practice knowledge. The facilitation approach is considered to be weak because it is primarily a pedagogical approach concerned with motivating students and fails to account for the type of knowledge that constitutes academic subjects. The paper makes a further claim for the importance of instructional teaching in modern society to argue that the identity of the modern, rational individual depends upon the direct teaching of abstract epistemically structured knowledge to successive generations. These collective representations which constitute the symbolic sphere, support the moral cohesion of democratic pluralistic societies.