Counter-intuitively, the problem of teaching for knowledge is not that content is always flawed, but that teacher hegemony serves to separate the student from their own learning. According to Csikszentmihalyi-5, it is the external and continuous manipulation of student attention that causes people to give up on the pleasures of learning.

Hence, teachers who rely on a pace-setting and marks-orientated style of leadership are apt to erode any honesty, creativity, enthusiasm, and satisfaction among their students (see Goleman-16). And as noted by Zimbardo-28, when one combines well-defined power-roles, gradually encroaching authority, high exiting/disobedience costs, and diffused responsibility with a legitimizing ideology, compliance can easily trump the empathy, ethics, and wishes of the individual.

Further exacerbating the problem, disengagement can slow student progression and bate the teacher into oversimplifying the curriculum just to cover everything. According to Ellis-12, this reduces the content to poorly connected facts of little meaning which not only bores the students, but also reduces the opportunity to develop higher order thinking skills.

In sum, teaching for knowledge only rewards the students who play the system and give the teacher what they think they want.

The Player

One of the most insightful things I noticed as I made my way through the first twelve years of Shultz's Peanuts, was that the characters will often start out as infants and grow up into children, which they remained for as long as fifty years - as if to imply that there is no such thing as an adult, only a bigger kid. This is how I like to conceive of the teacher: a fellow player who is trained to lead.

In sharp contrast with the instructional teaching for knowledge, it embraces the uncertainty of the world to cultivate a sense of wonder, and ideas exist to be played with and not just collected or admired in books. The role of teacher is simply to provide the toys.

Now, before we get into my methodology, I want to establish that this is grounded in the interests of society. Kane-19 suggests that play at all ages can strengthen resilience, well-being, identity, free-thinking, and autonomy, which makes it essential preparation for the interconnectedness, complexity, and unpredictability of 21st century living. But more fundamentally, Elkind-10 suggests that play is an instinct most central to our intellectual and social development.

Hence it is far better to co-opt this behavioural tendency than to fight it in the name of imposing content. As noted by Goleman-17, the best way to enhance performance — for both productivity and creativity — is to promote buy-in via consultation and the alignment of individual and organizational goals. But then, what do the students want and how can their interests align with the educators?

Starting with the students as players, there is a genuine need and desire to develop ownership of their learning and become self-directed, in which case they need an environment that is conducive to exploration and experimentation via the provision of stimuli and sufficient time and space (see Elkind-11). Furthermore, as noted by Csikszentmihalyi-6, what actually makes any learning activity stimulating is that it involves skill in a symbolic domain with rules - a goal, a way of obtaining feedback at the level of one's skills, and autonomy over their thoughts.