There are four conditions that need to be met for teacherly authority to be legitimate (I showed these graphically in this post).

The first is the ‘teacher’ (who can be any person, but often an adult) needs to have a capacity which is greater than that of the ‘student’ (who can be any person, but often a younger person).The second condition is that the teacher must have the desire to teach this capacity in the best interest of the student. These are the two conditions on the teacher.

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Sensory input from the world – in a raw form - is so overwhelming that our brains have developed ways to filter the stream so that we pay attention to what is relevant for our organism to continue to live and, indeed, to have more life. Teacherly authority works in a similar way, a young person’s attention is directed to what is relevant for the ongoing success of our culture and its transmission to the next generation, to its ongoing success.

In a postfigurative culture where the young simply do what their parents (and grandparents) did, this direction of attention becomes second nature for both “teacher” and “student”.

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As we move more deeply into a prefigurative culture – where the young best represent the future – then two things are happening. First, young people are increasingly rejecting what adults, imbued in the culture which is slowly dying, are telling them to do: work hard, pass your exams and you will have a good life. Second, they are hungry for the capabilities which they will need to co-create and face up to a new future – twenty-first century skills.

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Using the frame of teacherly authority, we can distinguish two broad capacities that a teacher may have to a greater extent than their students – subject knowledge and what we can call ‘life skills’, which might include critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, commitment and other components of twenty-first century skills.

A second element of teacherly authority is the intent to teach, which is normally there for subject knowledge (i.e., the traditional definition of teaching) but may not be there for life skills .In other words, highly competent teachers may have both sets of capacities to a high degree, which attracts students to them, but they do not have the intent to teach life skills.

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