Success in education seems to mean only that a child leaves the classroom with more information in his or her head than when he or she walked in. That crude way of thinking about what teachers do is exemplified in the (comprehensively misleading) documentary Waiting for "Superman," where learning is visualized as a teacher simply opening the brains of students and pouring knowledge in. This is a ridiculous way to portray the work of schooling, even setting aside the fact that sharing knowledge is in fact a very small part of teaching. (Facts can be Googled; it's learning processes, skills, that make education valuable.) No one who has ever taught would agree that teaching children is a straightforward affair, or that all children are equally easy to teach.
-Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
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