People think they sound very sophisticated saying things like ‘teaching is non-causal’ but it’s typical of educational academia, its inability to speak plainly and its elevation of commonplace ideas as profundities. Here’s the argument in a different context, shorn of academic language: Rain does not cause things to get wet because sometimes those things are under cover and sometimes, when the sun comes out, they dry quickly. It’s a basic misunderstanding or denial of statistical causation. Unless A leads to B 100% of the time in all situations, A does not cause B. To accept this argument would be to accept absurdities such as that smoking does not cause lung cancer. We can immediately see that this logic would not fare well in the worlds of medicine or epidemiology. Teaching is clearly causal. It causes learning. It does not do so 100% of the time and we can all accept there is complexity in the relationship, but leave the cod philosophy out of it.

“Teaching is a non-causal practice” A senior lecturer at one of Australia’s schools of education does not believe teaching causes learning. Let’s give up, go home, let the children play, close the schools and close the schools of education. blog.aare.edu.au/escape-oppr…