It is Teacher’s Day again. And I find myself wondering what exactly we have become so good at celebrating. We celebrate teachers, quite rightly. We speak of mentors and guides, of lives changed and futures shaped. We put up photographs, write messages, remember names. There is something deeply human in wanting to acknowledge those who taught us something. But I wonder whether I have become less interested in the figure of the teacher, and more interested in what teaching leaves behind. Because information is no longer scarce. In fact, it may be the opposite. There is now more information available to us than any teacher could possibly hope to give a student.

Answers arrive before questions have properly formed. Explanations are available before we have had time to wonder about the problem. What seems to be becoming scarce is something else. Discernment. I think about this more often than I used to. To know something is not quite the same as knowing what deserves to be known. To have an opinion is not the same as having thought. To be informed is not necessarily to understand. And, increasingly, to appear thoughtful is remarkably easy. Perhaps technology has something to do with this. Not because technology makes us less intelligent. It has done the opposite in so many ways: it has enlarged what we can know, make, discover and communicate. But it has also made it extraordinarily easy to display the signs of knowing.

We can display what we have read. What we care about. What we believe. What causes we support. What communities we belong to. Sometimes the position arrives before the thought behind it. Sometimes the answer arrives before the question has been understood. Sometimes an impression of expertise travels much faster than expertise itself. I don’t think this is necessarily deception. That would be too easy an explanation. Perhaps we have simply become accustomed to recognising the signs of things. And this is where I have begun to think differently about tokenism. We usually use the word to describe symbolic inclusion: someone is placed on a panel, a committee, a board or an advertisement so that an institution can demonstrate that it has included the right person.

But perhaps tokenism is a larger problem. Perhaps it begins whenever the symbol of something becomes an acceptable substitute for the thing itself. Participation........

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