To educate or to control

What is the role of educator in the classroom? Is it to educate or to control? Perhaps I have been hanging out with a different crowd, but in my mind, education is about exposing students to different ideas and knowledge or to allow students to have a deeper understanding of an area of specialisation.

However in recent days, I have been hearing different people say that in the classroom, it is about control. In fact, I am listening to a sharing by a IT vendor who is sharing a virtual classroom environment where teachers are able to “control” students in that the teacher has “control” over what the students do online in the classroom. Teachers can disable any applications in the laptop and only allow students to see what the teacher deem they should see when in class. I am sure that some would be quite happy to have this level of “control” in the class as a bid to re-direct the students from their laptops to the lesson. But, if we were the students, how would you feel if your laptop and its processes are being “controlled” by the teacher? Won’t this make students more “wary” of teachers and the learning environment that is created?

I can understand the frustrations that many teachers have when students seem to find the laptop more interesting then their lessons. I believe that this situation has 2 sides to it – Students ought to understand their role as learners and to use the laptop as a tool for learning in class, such as online collaboration, researching for information, taking notes etc. Teachers must also ask themselves if they have made their lessons engaging. By this I don’t mean that we have to entertain the class, as that is not our role, but to ask ourselves, how have we made this lesson more applicable, more approachable, and how to help our students bridge their gap between what they know and what teachers want them to learn. I am sure teachers can do it without resorting to “control” tactics to gain attention from the students.

It is ironic that as we use technology to allow students greater freedom in learning through the use of internet, online collaboration & virtual world and now we are also using technology to limit students’ access to the information out there. What kind of message are we sending the students? That you can only learn what I ( the teacher)think you should learn? Isn’t this going back to the era where teacher is the authority and only they can provide the answers and solutions? What happened to “teach less, learn more”? Have we instead become “teach less, control more”? Would more control equate to more learning?