Is Knowledge Taught or Learned

 If the members of an academic community are polled on ways to improve the quality of education, the students are likely to suggest hiring and promoting faculty who are better teachers, while the faculty probably will suggest admitting brighter, better prepared, and more motivated students. 

• Whose opinion is the more valid? 
• How responsible in fact, are the faculty for how much students learn and for how insightful they become?
•  How responsible are faculty members for students' proficiencies in fundamental skills—reading, thinking, writing, and speaking—or for students' attitudes toward learning? 
• Who is most to blame when students pursue college merely for vocational rewards or social distractions?

 Conversely who deserves credit for those rare students who not only master basic content and skills but understand a discipline in fresh and original ways and are somehow able to integrate the knowledge they have gleaned in various areas into a single, personal vision? In College Professoring, O.P. Kolstoe answers these questions by asserting that "nobody can't teach nobody nothing" (1975, p. 61). He is correct. No instructor can make students learn. Consequently, college teachers cannot claim full credit when a student learns something well, nor must they cam' all the blame when students fail to learn. Given students' freedom to take or leave what we instructors have to offer, it is crucial that we take pains to see that they become involved in learning. The importance of this motivational function is immense.

What differences among students require different teaching methods' Individual differences in students" abilities to do academic work are foremost. Students learn a subject at different rates and with strikingly different levels of completeness. College teachers are often amazed at the brilliance of some students and the shallowness of others. Regardless of the amount of work some students put into their studies, the complexity of their thinking fails to match that of others. Our society's contemporary social ethic tends to deny the importance of differences in fundamental academic ability, but psychological research (Guilford, 1968; Scarr, 1981) and the experience of college teachers support the influence of intelligence on the quality of student learning. How fully students apply the themselves also affects how much they learn, but motivation can go only so far in compensating for differences in ability. 

We as instructors cannot be held responsible for the differences in ability students bring with them, but we are responsible for motivating all students, from the gifted to the barely adequate, to do their best work and to love the learning experience. College teachers have as much power to dampen students enthusiasm for learning as to excite it.