Teacher roles in contemporary American schools should be more closely aligned to hermeneutics as the study of meaning (interpretation/understanding). A marriage between Platonic notions of interpretation and the quest for meaning with the interpretive theories of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is suggested. Schleiermacher argues that understanding cannot focus primarily on parts (words) without considering the effect the parts may have on the whole (ideas). In addition, von Humboldt contended that meaning is coproduced by the speaker and listener and is woven with cultural threads. He also believed that historians must unite separate historical components into a unified aggregate. For Dilthey, the task of hermeneutics, and interpreters, is to unite the past with the present through reconstruction. Gadamer explored the notion of how language forms the boundaries of understanding and interpretation. Teachers can apply hermeneutics in the classroom by changing their role from depositors of information to intellectual interpreters of information. Rather than being supplied with texts and goals and being required to apply "correct interpretations" of them, teachers would involve students in the construction of meaning around ideas which generate from within their experiences. (Contains 23 references.) (JDD)