Writers Purpose in the Expository piece The Faceless Teacher 1999, by Dennis Gardner

The purpose of this piece is to illustrate how pervasive and dangerous the computer has become that it has seeped into our everyday lives as learners and warns that it shouldn’t serve as a replacement for our daily interactions with teachers. He warns of the dangers of setting young students out into a “phantom resource,” where the ideas and content spouted are done by anonymous voices and the students are faced with the choice of sink or swim dependent on the field of information they mine. He focuses on the theme of faceless teacher in that we are unaware of who is presenting the facts that many of us take in dogmatically without taking a critical eye as to their qualifications and intentions behind the information. Whereas with the teacher in the class room there is a ‘face’ behind the words , an expert that he student can validate has the expertise to speak on an issue. Students he illustrates need the warmth and interaction that takes place in the normal classroom , the jousting of natural competition and the medium of transference that is so severely lacking in the interaction with the ‘faceless teacher’.