Isn’t this what we’re really teaching toward, all the time?
If you aren’t teaching with a goal of self-sufficiency, you are cursing your students to a lifetime of needing someone to help them. Instead, my hope is “For the next one, do it yourself.”
I can play your notes for you today; next semester, can you learn your notes with me helping?
I can tell you how to make this phrase musical; can you learn to interpret it without my guidance?
I can assess your composition and offer a critique; can you learn to assess your next work before it leaves your studio?
A lot of students can get alarmingly far in school working for validation rather than self-sufficiency. Their only concern, it can seem, is approval from the teacher, from the professor. If we as educators agree to that paradigm, then our students will never be able to fly on their own.
Good news for future employment, perhaps. But bad news for our students’ future.