Somebody commented yesterday on the thread about the above topic, putting forward an interesting hypothesis. She suggested that some parents are natural teachers, while others are born facilitators. Children too come in different types; some are naturally autonomous learners and others are predisposed to being taught. I am not at all sure what to make of this idea.
To begin with of course, this is just a form of biological determinism. I cannot teach little Mary because her predetermined character is such that she will not respond well to being taught. Or perhaps; I can't teach GCSE physics, because I am biologically a facilitator and not a natural teacher. I am bound to say that on the face of it, this strikes me as being a pretty strange way of looking at the case. If I make a poor job of accomplishing some task, whether it is teaching physics or fixing a car, I tend to assume that the fault lies in me and not in the car or the child. If there are natural born teachers, then I suppose that there must also be natural born mechanics, natural born electricians and natural born architects as well. This is a weird concept and one with which I have difficulties. Do these biological predispositions have a gender bias? Are women more likely to be facilitators and men teachers?
How would we know if this idea held true for children, that their rejection of teaching ws an inbuilt feature of their character rather than just a result of bad teaching which has put them off being taught? I suppose we would need to do some research involving identical twins separated at birth. Does anybody have any actual evidence for this idea? I am not rejecting the notion out of hand, but it seems to be to be inherently implausible and something of a cop-out for poor quality teaching. I say this, because I have frequently heard teachers advance the same argument when their pupils are failing. They say things like 'What can you expect from that family?' or 'Oh the kids from that estate are all the same!' In other words, they too attribute the fact that their pupils are not thriving academically not to their own shortcomings as teachers but to this same biological determinism. Some kids are born to fail at school. Can this be true?
