The teacher's role in the pedagogic exchange is to represent the general equivalent, administering equivalences among the students, who participate in his [or her] unity by subsuming themselves under his [or her] generality. Before the teacher, there is formal equality within the collective of students. Instruction is thus modeled on exchange: to teach, the teacher disregards the differences and distinctions within the concrete student manifold and addresses [her or] himself to the faceless, abstract student that is [her or] his counterpart. Likewise, to learn, the student abandons the idiosyncratic expressions of his [or her] life for a generic way of thinking that raises him [or her] to the level of the teacher.
-- from "Heidegger on the Art of Teaching", excerpt from transcript of the Deposition of Professor Dr. Martin Heidegger, submitted before the Committee on De-Nazification, 1945.
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