How could teachers be agents in societal transformation?

Answer 1

By helping people out of their unhappy consciousness.

A partial excerpt:

"The Unhappy Consciousness
Φ 207. Hence the Unhappy Consciousness (1) the Alienated Soul which is the consciousness of self as a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being.

Φ 208. This unhappy consciousness, divided and at variance within itself, must, because this contradiction of its essential nature is felt to be a single consciousness, always have in the one consciousness the other also; and thus must be straightway driven out of each in turn, when it thinks it has therein attained to the victory and rest of unity. Its true return into itself, or reconciliation with itself, will, however, display the notion of mind endowed with a life and existence of its own, because it implicitly involves the fact that, while being an undivided consciousness, it is a double-consciousness. It is itself the gazing of one self-consciousness into another, and itself is both, and the unity of both is also its own essence; but objectively and consciously it is not yet this essence itself — is not yet the unity of both.

Since, in the first instance, it is the immediate, the implicit unity of both, while for it they are not one and the same, but opposed, it takes one, namely, the simple unalterable, as essential, the other, the manifold and changeable as the unessential. For it, both are realities foreign to each other. Itself, because consciousness of this contradiction, assumes the aspect of changeable consciousness and is to itself the unessential; but as consciousness of unchangeableness, of the ultimate essence, it must, at the same time, proceed to free itself from the unessential, i.e. to liberate itself from itself. For though in its own view it is indeed only the changeable, and the unchangeable is foreign and extraneous to it, yet itself is simple, and therefore unchangeable consciousness, of which consequently it is conscious as its essence, but still in such wise that itself is again in its own regard not this essence. The position, which it assigns to both, cannot, therefore, be an indifference of one to the other, i.e. cannot be an indifference of itself towards the unchangeable. Rather it is immediately both itself; and the relation of both assumes for it the form of a relation of essence to the non-essential, so that this latter has to be cancelled; but since both are to it equally essential and are contradictory, it is only the conflicting contradictory process in which opposite does not come to rest in its own opposite, but produces itself therein afresh merely as an opposite.
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http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phbb.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phconten.htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_terms.htm

Answer 2

They are and can be agents of societal transformation simply by teaching anything that tends to shape attitudes and beliefs.

For an example, a teacher can emphasize his/her own social agenda such as racial notions, political notions, religious notions, etc. The list goes on and on.

This does not have to be done on a very obvious level. Younger students can admire a teacher and want to be like her/him. These young impressionable minds will accept what a teacher says uncritically and without question.

The job of a teacher is to teach and all kinds of social transforming ideas and behaviors are communicated. This is not necessarily good or bad. It's just what is expected to happen.

Answer 3

I'm a teacher of 20 years. It's looks like we are so conservative and the voice of the establishment, anti-change, but if you se how schools operaste these days compared to 20 years ago there IS gradual and ongoing change. Much of today's equity-based thinking (non-sexist, non-racist) has come from the bit-by-bit values changing that teacher-practitioners quietly pursue "at the chalkface" every day. Our collective sense of responsibility for caring for the planet is largely due to schoolteachers.