Teaching is the art of awakening persons and then persuading them to want to stay awake.
Such teaching as the Faber Institute offers recognizes that teaching is not primarily about the successful communication of a content of knowledge, as much as it is about showing persons how fully to appropriate for themselves their powers of imagination and intellect and richly-textured affect, through which powers they themselves want to understand and care to give their lives for what is real and genuinely worthy of their commitment.
A teacher uses particular kinds of knowledge to awaken his or her students, but who then learns from his awakened students what they then need to stay awake and growing in their understanding.
Teaching fails to become learning not because the content of knowledge is poor in itself, but because the teacher failed to take the time to understand his or her students, and so to learn how to awaken them to their own powers – what our religious tradition has referred to as their “powers of soul.”