ABSTRACT
Current classroom practice is largely derived from the belief that the teacher's basic task is the “transmission of knowledge.” At one level this statement is obviously true—any pedagogy is concerned with the transmission of values and ways of knowing—but at the level of rhetoric “transmission” has come to characterize a particular view of practice and an associated view of knowledge as a commodity. The distinction between transmission as an aspect of pedagogy and transmission as pedagogy is in this sense crucial. What may seem a superficial confusion in educationists' language might mark a deeper confusion of considerable importance. Implicit in the notion of transmission is a one-way communication; it is to “pass on, hand on” 1 knowledge from the teacher to the pupil. In this chapter I take “transmission” as characterizing any educational incident that sets the learning of knowledge previously planned or defined by the teacher as the basic objective. In thus characterizing transmission I am echoing practice derived from this model in that curricula and lessons center on the prior definition of knowledge for transmission. The transmission pedagogue works to defend this prior definition against interactive redefinition.
