Funny old place America. In 2006, Oprah Winfrey played host to a teacher with an incredible story to tell: one Brad Cohen, winner of the (I kid you not) Howard R Swearer Student Humanitarian Award and writer of the seminal tome Front of the Class: How Tourette Syndrome Made Me the Teacher I Never Had.

Discovering the existence of this text led me to wonder what lessons might be like in Cohen's class, and how great might be the pupils' whoops at the beginning of the year when they discover he is to be their teacher. You can bet there's never a dull moment in Brad's class: even if the subject he is teaching is dry, there's a cast-iron guarantee that his delivery won't disappoint. The Tourette Syndrome Association of America, congratulating Brad on winning best educational book of 2005, notes that "Brad still gets ejected from movie theatres and restaurants", but adds that he remains, of course, "an inspiration to us all".

Being ejected from public places is not an entirely unusual experience for educators. We are an odd lot. And this column is written in defence of those of us, like Brad, who stand in front of children and bravely manifest our vulnerabilities for their edutainment on a daily basis. Those of us who shamelessly still indulge in that near criminal, utterly subversive activity: front-of-class teaching.

I've noticed that what was once such a central responsibility of the job that it gave it its name has been progressively devalued to become, in the view of the legislators, of almost marginal import. Teaching has been absented from the centre stage of our professional discourse and replaced by the less easily quantified "learning".

Over the past decade, we have gone from being specialists in "teaching", to being slightly less expert in the broader field of "teaching and learning"; and from thence to being bewildered in the realms of the cumbersomely entitled "learning and teaching".

Numerous studies show that the bridge between teaching and learning is sometimes a bit rickety, and that what we might think of as great teaching doesn't necessarily result in the most learning. Teaching and learning is a transaction that has four possible outcomes. The first and second show an easily understood cause and effect: either the teaching is good and kids learn stuff, or it's crap and they don't. However, there are instances when the teaching is great and the kids learn nothing, or, strangely, occasions when the teacher couldn't knock the pedagogic equivalent of the skin off a rice pudding but the kids still get multiple A-stars.

The existence of the third of these, functional teaching that results in little learning, has caused the profession, rightly, to look at ways in which kids learn.

The pivotal importance of learning admitted, it seems a logical step to reorder the responsibility, so that job adverts now ask for deputy heads in charge of "learning and teaching", in that order, and university faculties have ridiculous new nomenclatures. This reordering shows a perverse misunderstanding of cause and effect - while teaching will often cause learning, learning will only in very sad circumstances cause teaching - and is nonsensical. It also has the effect of taking teachers away from their position at the front of the class, transforming their role into that of facilitator, disinterested guide or, worse still, babysitter. It may be seen as part of an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to devalue teaching.

If a teacher, rather than being a highly skilled artist, craftsperson or technician, is transmuted into a deskilled lackey facilitating learning, then children will lose out. From our own schooling we remember, most of all, the charismatic madman, deliberately donning a coat of antic disposition, blowing things up at the front of the class.

We remember the front-of-class teacher, and we remember his lessons and how excited we were to be in them.

The foregrounding of learning over teaching is his death knell; a ringing that foretells also of a move towards serried ranks of students plugged into computers, supervised by an ICT technician.

So, I return in praise of Brad Cohen, whose book, after all, is called Front of the Class. Brad may well find it difficult to get served in a restaurant, but like the traditionalist headteacher who suggested to me, at the start of my career, that I do a lot of front-of-class teaching, he knows that the front is a good place for a teacher to stand. No matter what we are told by our betters, real teachers understand that they are, to quote Haim Ginott, famous teacher and psychologist, "the decisive element".

Real teachers know that while learning might sometimes happen accidentally, without great teaching it doesn't happen with any degree of regularity, or with much joy. Real teachers know that without them standing at the front of the class, delivering the knowledge, excitement, encouragement, passion and fun, schools will be very dull places indeed.