I have to agree. The distinction between &quot;teaching&quot; and &quot;imparting information to achieve x goal&quot; seems to be getting lost here. Teaching to me involves a give and take of some kind, some form of productive conversation or line of questioning rather than just inserting data into brains in a linear fashion.<p>I did find the unapologetically mechanistic perspective here interesting though, since I just got done teaching St. Augustine (&quot;City of God&quot;) to a class of very bright students at an Ivy League university. They hated it and I couldn&#x27;t figure out why at first. To me its a treasure trove of fun minutiae about weird Roman deities, a deep meditation on why empires rise and fall, and an example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history at the height of his powers. To them it was boring - even more boring than Aristotle&#x27;s Nichomachean Ethics which I personally find dry as dust.<p>The reason, it became apparent, was that St. Augustine was doing something similar to what this blog post outlines - following a didactic line of argument intended to dissuade potential disagreements rather than provoke them. (I personally don&#x27;t see Augustine that way, but they did - in the words of a student, &quot;it felt like a lecture and not a conversation.&quot;) Or, perhaps, they thought Augustine was selling his ideology rather than teaching it?