If information is now available for everybody, What is the purpose of teachers?

In answer to Quora question "If information is now available for everybody, What is the purpose of teachers?"

A2A. My take is that teachers:

1. Help students learn how to think critically about information and how to evaluate it, and to not just absorb information indiscriminately.

2. Help students learn the various skills of research, the different qualities of information, the importance of the scientific method, ways to prioritize and organization information, ways to deepen understanding of subject matter, ways to ask probing questions about information - in other words, teachers help students learn how to learn.

3. Help students contextualize, correlate and interrelate information so that it can become useful knowledge.

4. Help structure the learning experience in a way that allows students to build on previous knowledge and create the requisite foundation for the next step in their understanding of a given field.

5. Help inspire students to discover and become interested in new information - or whole new fields of thought and experience - that they may never have been exposed to before.

6. Help students realize just how profoundly ignorant they are - no matter how much they think they know - to facilitate a necessary and perpetual humility and as an antidote to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

7. Help students overcome the natural fear of and resistance to learning something new or different, or something that contradicts what they already know, or something that revises their entire worldview.

8. Help students prepare for ever more rigorous, challenging, complex, sophisticated and/or specialized learning curves as they continue into higher levels of education.

So teachers do an awful lot - if they are skillful teachers.

My 2 cents.

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