• Question: If one teacher can't teach evry subject, why does the student have to learn every subject?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      School is about giving you a broad overview of a variety of subjects. The teacher knows a lot about each subject, but it is their job to give you a flavour so that you can get a good foundation of knowledge. It also gives you a chance to find out which subjects you enjoy so that you can dive into more details during later years of your education.

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      It’s important that a teacher is able to explain (almost) everything in their subject, so that you can learn in a way that makes it interesting and also ensures that you get the most out of being taught that subject. You aren’t expected to leave school as an expert in all the subjects you are learning, just to have a good understanding of them all so that you have the foundation to do anything you want to do later on! To be able to give you that foundation, your teachers need to be experts in the subjects they teach, and they can’t be experts in everything no matter how clever they are!

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      it’s all about giving everyone the chance to experience lots of different topics, breadth of knowledge as opposed to depth.
      When you get to Alevel, it starts getting more about depth, and, like now at PhD, I only focus on one very small area of physics, so it’s all about depth.

      BTW, if you ask your teacher a deep question about their teaching topic, you would expect them to know the answer, so because they are teaching, for them it’s about depth too.

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Clever question, 12reamj! 😉
      It’s very important for students to learn about a broad number of subjects for many different reasons.
      First, it’s very important to understand the world in which we live, and to become aware citizens capable of making good decisions for the future.
      Second, you have to get some idea what the different areas of knowledge are in order to be able to chose a job you will like in the future. If you don’t get exposed to anything, how will you discover what your passion is?
      Third, different fields and subjects use many different ways of thinking about problems. If you were only to learn one, when you’d face a new problem in life you’d have very limited tools to try to solve it. But by learning different subjects, you learn many different ways of thinking (much more than just the fact, equations, dates, spellings, etc..!!), so you have many tools in hand to attack new problems and challenges you will face in life. Something like what Einstein said: ‘Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.’ ‘The value of education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think’

      Now the reason why your teachers teach only one subject is not that they wouldn’t be able to teach the most basic material in every subject! Most probably they would be able to teach at least the very minimum (if you gave them a chance to prepare, that is! 😉 )! But having experts in each specific subject means that you can get much more out of each lesson: their expertise allows them to present the ‘big picture’ without overlooking important basic elements, to make lectures original and to reinvent them as each subject progresses with years (like biology, it’s developing insanely fast, and you have to be an expert to keep up), to answer questions from interested/curious students (I’m pretty sure you’d prefer to have an expert who knows what he/she is talking about for that!!), etc…

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