Like any other professional activity, teaching requires a cultivated ability. To be done exceptionally well, it also requires a special talent and sense of vocation. There are born teachers just as there are born statesmen or born musicians. Practiced diligently by men and women of talent, teaching is as much of an art as Shaw s metier of play-writing. The trouble from the teacher s point of view is that there are a lot more teachers than playwrights or men of action like generals or financiers.
Education is one of our nation s biggest industries.
Because of the sheer number of those who teach in schools, colleges and universities, they have become part of the landscape. Like the familiar features of a landscape, they tend to be overlooked. Unlike sports, politics, entertainment, the arts or the law, teaching does not give rise to stars. Nobody ever got a Nobel Prize for teaching achievements. True, many academics have come in for high honours, but always for something other than their work in the classroom a book, an economic treatise, a ground-breaking scientific experiment.