These words refer to the process by which knowledge is imparted to students. Teach suggests a guided process of assigned work, discipline, directed study and the presentation of examples. It may or may not suggest an academic context: teaching his son to change a flat tyre; teaching her pupils the letters of the alphabet. Intransitively, it refers to this work thought of as a profession: deciding he would teach after he graduated; teaching in the medical faculty at university. Educate is more formal than teach and is less specific; it could not substitute for teach in any of the examples above, referring in a more general way to a long-range, wide-scale academic process: educating the coming generation by means of newly discovered methods. Sometimes the word suggests the accomplishing of greater results than teach : schools that teach but fail to educate their students.

School is used rarely as a substitute for teach, and suggests an especially thorough process: schooling the class in the essentials of arithmetic; parents who had schooled their children in the social graces. Oddly enough, as in the last example, the word need not suggest an academic context at all, though it does indicate a special effort or training, often to master complex rather than rudimentary matters: schooling himself in the fine distinctions his new job would require him to make; having schooled herself to ignore his angry outbursts. Instruct is closer in function to teach than educate or school. It is more formal, and is mostly restricted to the specific situation of guided training or to the imparting of information or commands: one teacher to give the lecture classes, another to instruct the discussion groups; a manual instructing the buyer on the installation of an air-conditioner; instructing the cleaning woman to come an hour earlier on Monday.

Tutor refers to an individual relationship between teacher and student: English university colleges where each student is tutored by a don. Often the word refers to remedial or special work done outside the classroom: offering to tutor him in French in exchange for German lessons; The schoolboy’s father engaged a university student to tutor him in his worst subjects. In many universities and other tertiary institutions, the tutoring is carried out with small groups rather than, or as well as, with individuals.

Coach and train are rather specialized kinds of teaching which have been extended from their usual sporting context to the more academic. Coach is very similar to the sense of tutor in which the student is helped individually or in a group, but with the essential difference that coach is not used when advancement of knowledge is involved. It is specifically regarded as a helping or remedial type of teaching : He was privately coached in mathematics to bring him level with the rest of his class. In its educational sense, train is used when certain skills as well as knowledge are being mastered for some higher vocation: trained as an X-ray technician; an extension of in-service training for teachers.

Indoctrinate , alone of these words, suggests the inculcation of propaganda or prejudices rather than unbiased knowledge; parents who indoctrinate their children with religious intolerance; school that unconsciously indoctrinate their students with middle-class values.