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Is Teaching a Skill? University of Edinburgh Teaching and Education We may start with some fairly uncontroversial differences between education and teaching. First, usage supports regarding teaching, but not education, as a kind of activity. We might say: "please do not interrupt me while I'm teaching," but it seems odd to say: "not now while I'm educating." Teaching is also characterizable as an intentional activity; it is undertaken with the purpose of bringing about learning, which is why we can barely grasp what it is to teach in advance of some idea of what it is to learn. In this connection, it is worth noting that the surface grammar of pedagogical usage can be misleading. For example, we speak of X teaching Y, where Y is not infrequently ambiguous between persons and topics. Thus, we talk indifferently either of Mr. Smith teaching mathematics or of Miss Jones teaching Sarah or 4B, which can court such uncritical slogans as "one teaches children not subjects" (or vice versa). Such temptations are more easily resisted, however, once one grasps that the proper logical form of statements about teaching is better captured by "X teaches Y to Z": that, in short, instruction is invariably a matter of teaching something to someone. Education and educating, on the other hand, seem to be both more and less than activities. It is not just that educating and education are not, like teaching, subject to interruption by my tea break, but also that we can speak of education in circumstances where talk of teaching seems inappropriate (for example, education through experience) and that there are forms of teaching which may not be in any significant sense educational (for example, sports coaching). For related reasons, I should also want to resist talk of either teaching or education as processes, which I suspect follows from some popular confusion of education with schooling.1 Unlike the activity of teaching or the process of schooling, which are sequences of acts or events which may have datable beginnings or ends, education has more the quality of a state with no clear beginning or end. Moreover, though it is natural to speak of schooling as a process we undergo or endure, it may be better to regard education, like teaching, as an enterprise or project which we undertake or in which we engage. Formally, then, we might say that schooling is the process we undergo in order to achieve (amongst other things) the state of education via the activity of teaching. Teaching and Skill Skill Conceptions: Science and Art Pedagogical Virtues and the Moral Dimension Teaching and Rival Traditions of Development and Learning Wider Curriculum Implications of Rival Accounts of Development Conclusion In the last analysis, however, I believe that although there certainly are pedagogical skills, teaching just as certainly cannot be reduced to such skills. Indeed, I suspect that the skill card has lately been greatly overplayed in professional educational circles (not least perhaps by academic teacher trainers anxious to prove that they have something of pedagogical substance to offer to teaching trainees), and that the mastery of much that is worth calling skills plays a relatively small part in any mature understanding of effective teaching. First, with particular regard to the pedagogical techné which seems to have assumed such prominence in the deliberations of contemporary competence mongers, though it is doubtless advantageous for teachers to a