Is Teaching-Learning Essentially a Business?

Frank H. W. Edler
Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, NE
Copyright © 2002 Frank Edler

This is an important question, especially these days when ownership and intellectual property policies are being decided at colleges and universities. If teaching-learning is essentially a business, then whatever teachers create to enhance the learning process would be owned by the school, college, or university just as in any other business where such works are regarded as "works-for-hire."

In addition, the question is very old and goes back to the roots of the western tradition. For example, sophists were those scholar-teachers in ancient Greece who traveled from city-state to city-state teaching subjects like grammar, mathematics, and rhetoric for a fee. Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was highly prized because there were no lawyers in those days, and you had to argue your own case before the court.

One such sophist, Protagoras, who was a favorite target of Plato, defined what students should learn from him in the following way: " 'The proper care of his personal affairs, so that he may best manage his own household, and also of the state's affairs, so as to become a real power in the city both as speaker and as man of action' " (Sophists,38). There were others, of course, who criticized this practice of teaching for a fee such as Socrates who thought that wisdom should be shared freely among friends.

The question "Is teaching-learning essentially a business?" is a question of definition. I have asked this question of some of my colleagues for whom I have the greatest respect as teachers, and their response was to affirm that teaching-learning is a business. I was taken aback by their response. Let me explain. I agree with them if the claim they are making is that teaching-learning can be understood as a business. Almost any activity can be offered for sale on the open market and understood in this sense as a business. Does this mean, however, that these activities themselves would have to be defined as a business? Of course not. Nevertheless, an odd shift has been taking place in the last twenty or thirty years (perhaps it is only more pronounced of late): activities that become marketable are then totally defined by market relations.

To say that teaching-learning is essentially a business is to say that business is an essential characteristic of teaching-learning. It means that the buying-and-selling of teaching-learning is an essential aspect of any teaching-learning. Is this true? When I think of what teaching-learning is, do I have to think of it as a business? Of course not.

Let me use an analogy. Say I have the skill and knowledge of how to make chairs. An essential aspect of what it means for anything to be a chair is that it can prop up my behind in some way. If this is an essential aspect of any chair, then it means that I cannot think of what a chair is without also thinking that it's something to prop up my behind. Of course, I can offer my ability to make chairs on the open market. When I do so, does that mean that all chairs must now be understood as something bought-and-sold on the open market? Of course not. I don't have to sell that skill at all. I can make a chair for my own home or for a friend. Obviously, when I think of a chair, I don't have to think of it as something bought and sold on the open market.

The same goes for teaching-learning: this activity can be offered on the open market, but that doesn't mean that I have to think of it as something that is bought and sold. My point here is that buying-and-selling is not essential to understanding what teaching-learning is.

Teaching-learning happens all the time in many contexts that are not business contexts. Parents teach their children and, hopefully, children learn, but this teaching-learning is not a business. Two people at a bar discuss Socrates. Both may be teachers and learners; they may teach and learn from each other. This teaching-learning, however, is not a business.

It may be true that all salespeople are good teachers, but I would hope that all teachers are not necessarily good salespeople because the point of teaching is not to get students to "buy" something but to get them to think for themselves, that is, to get them to gain a position even apart from business in order to evaluate the value of business itself.

Frank Edler