The educational process: Teaching or learning?

Abstract

Every social group needs to pass on its accumulated experience over time to the next generation, as a condition of its historical continuity. The fact that the individual members of the group are always renewing themselves, whether through death or birth, gives rise to the need for this accumulated experience, which is called knowledge and exists outside of individual time, to be organised into a memory that remains in historical time. The question is whether it is more useful for the reproduction of the group for new people to reproduce knowledge, or to understand the need for it by practising its usefulness. The first would be to teach what you already have, subordinated to the letter of what you already possess as an explanation of nature and the relationships between men; the second would be to learn the process that dynamises the operations by which the human mind solves a question each time it is faced with a problem.