ABSTRACT
The best teachers perform a role akin to that of a good coach or personal trainer. The best teachers are primarily concerned with facilitating our inclination to learn, with stimulating and maintaining our interest and enthusiasm, rather than with 'transmitting' their knowledge to us. Learning suggests an analogy with 'fitness' not only in the everyday physiological sense of the word, but also in its specialised Darwinian sense. The adaptation of living creatures to their everchanging environments is the embodiment in the living world of a constant, natural 'learning process'. Theories of learning are presented to trainee teachers as a debate between the competing discourses of behaviourism, cognitivism and humanism. This chapter describes what might be regarded as the differences between the psychoanalytic theory of learning and the other three discourses, and proposes some key axioms for a psychoanalytic understanding of learning, drawing upon classical Freudian theory.
