Something I’m trying to articulate
The problem: Temporal dissonance. Education aims to prepare individuals for a future that educators themselves cannot fully anticipate, relying on knowledge forged in a past the learners did not experience.
Educators are tasked with offering guidance drawn from experiences that learners will never share and may even reject.
The very frameworks that shape learners’ early cognition become the raw material for their future dissent. Thus education becomes a site of negotiated memory and imaginative re-authoring.
Education is not about transmitting fixed truths, but cultivating interpretive openness. Teachers and students engage in a fusion of horizons, where tradition is not imposed but reinterpreted. The classroom becomes a space of dialogical meaning-making, not just content delivery.
Students must first internalise the legacy of their teachers before they can critique or transcend it—formation begets critique. This reflects a hermeneutic loop: understanding tradition precedes challenging it.
The teacher creates the conditions for learners to interpret, critique, and evolve—then steps back. Authority dissolves into mutual responsiveness, where the teacher becomes a co-narrator, not a sovereign. As learners fuse horizons with past knowledge, they outgrow the framework that introduced it—and this is not failure, but fulfillment.
If we take seriously the idea that education is not about transmission but about transformation, then perhaps the teacher’s role is designed not for permanence but for gradual self-effacement.
Education should thus involve the planned obsolescence of the teacher.
A solution: Teacher obsolescence as a pedagogical grace. Deliberate structuring of learning environments so that the teacher’s expertise, authority, and direct intervention become progressively unnecessary as students develop self-directed, critical, and interpretive capacities.
Adekunmi Olatunji 