A teacher can give us explanations but she cannot give us understanding. The function of the teacher is not to trade ideas. It is a bane of what we laughingly call our educational system that the seminar, once the preserve of graduate studies, has trickled down into high schools, into grade schools, into kindergarten. I suppose that in day care centers they now consult the toddlers to find out how to run the place. A teacher, by definition, knows more than we do, if we are pupils.
Teaching is an art and learning is another, but they are distinct, if complementary, activities.
Confusing the one with the other is a sure way to prevent either from achieving its end. Graduates are now blissfully ignorant of history and mathematics and science. We will be told that they now think for themselves and are not as docile as kids once were. Well, no doubt it does put a crimp into one's creativity to have to accept the multiplication table, the precise dates when things happened, and who founded the country and why. But to call this having one's own ideas about such things could only occur to a product of such an educational system.