True teachers....

True teachers do not provide knowledge as a benefit to their pupils; they treat their pupils as a benefit to knowledge. Of course they love their pupils, but they love knowledge more. And their overriding concern is to pass on that knowledge by lodging it in brains that will last longer than their own. Their methods are not “child-centred” but “knowledge-centred”, and the focus of their interest is the subject, rather than the things that might make that subject for the time being “relevant” to matters of no intellectual concern. Any attempt to make education relevant risks reducing it to those parts that are of relevance to the uneducated – which are invariably the parts with the shortest life span. A relevant curriculum is one from which the difficult core of knowledge has been excised, and while it may be relevant now, it will be futile in a few years’ time. Conversely, irrelevant-seeming knowledge, when properly acquired, is not merely a discipline that can be adapted and applied; it is likely to be exactly what is needed in circumstances that nobody foresaw. The “irrelevant” sciences of Boolean algebra and Fregean logic gave birth, in time, to the digital computer; the “irrelevant” studies of Greek, Latin and ancient history enabled a tiny number of British graduates to govern an empire that stretched around the world; while the “irrelevant” paradoxes of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason caused the theory of relativity to dawn in the mind of Albert Einstein.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article2072331.ece