Teaching as an Invitation to Reasoning

One aim of education is the transmission of knowledge. The present paper argues that in order to achieve this aim teachers should be exemplars of reasoning for their students. The contents of education are typically propositions or theories that cannot be accepted without understanding how the related beliefs are justified through inferences from given premises. If a belief is inferentially justified, however, in order to understand how it is justified, one has to follow the reasoning that leads to a particular conclusion. For this reason, in their classes, teachers should not be expected to provide a kind of testimony but rather a kind of argumentation. The students cannot simply believe what they are told because the teacher said it; rather, they have to understand the arguments that support the teacher’s claim. When a teacher presents an argument to them, the students will follow it with the attention required to grasp it themselves if they see the teacher’s reasoning as a successful practice in which they want to be involved