ABSTRACT
Clarifying for oneself the objectives of one’s teaching is the first step in getting an insight into ways of tackling an extremely complex task. As I have argued before, teaching is not as simple an operation as most people think. My experience with teachers in all stages in their careers suggests to me that they, too, underestimate its complexity. This is not surprising since they have all spent a lifetime in a society that equates teaching with telling, and teachers are unlikely to have discussed such matters or to have addressed in their training the problems caused by this assumption. In recent years political pressures in many countries have reinforced this view of teaching and have promulgated with increased stridency an image of teaching as a low-level a-theoretical activity.
