THE
CHANGING METAPHORS OF EDUCATION
Education,
meaning the process
of teaching and learning some form of knowledge or skill, is a concept that has
been described in metaphorical terms almost since its earliest formal
conceptualization. The terminology used to describe the value of education,
products of scholarship, individual formal aspects of an education or the
entire process itself has been based heavily on abstracting metaphor since the
time of Aristotle and Socrates, and is by no means limited to recent
developments in the English language. In fact, very few terms associated with
education have ever been particularly unabstracted,
a situation pointed out by the difficulty of describing the concept of
education in terms that do not rely heavily (if not exclusively) on metaphor.
The study of
literature, being the realm in which the use of language has traditionally been
most immediately explored (and the “mother” department of linguistics in many
cases) in higher education is especially susceptible to metaphorical
abstraction of its products and processes, a phenomenon which this paper will
argue is undergoing a change away from a paradigm based on a metaphors of
guidance and initiation towards metaphors based on expansion and discovery. To
do so, I will begin with an overview of some traditional and historical notions
about the role of education and how those ideas translate themselves into
metaphorical schema. Then, using some examples taken from presentation and
session titles from the 1998 Modern Language Association meeting in
As an opening
salvo against the idea that academic jargon is somehow “worse” or more
pronounced in the 1990s is contained within Peter Burke's excellent 1995 piece
entitled “The Jargon of the Schools,” in which he takes the reader through the
history of complaints about the abstracted (and potentially meaningless) nature
of the language of education. In his introductory discussion of the subject,
Burke writes:
The phenomenon of academic jargon...is
sometimes explained by the over-specialization and competition of the modern
academic world, the proliferation of new disciplines, journals and university
departments and the consequent need for individuals and groups to mark out and
defend their intellectual territory and to distinguish themselves from their
competitors.[...]
Such
relatively new developments may encourage jargon, but the phenomenon—or the
accusation anyway--goes back at least as far as the ancient world.1
He then goes on to discuss, in great
detail, the barbs hurled against linguistic innovations in academic discourse
by writers and thinkers like Plato (who railed against the original Sophists),
Epicurus, Seneca, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Webster, Locke and
others up to the 1960s. Burke's essay points out an important, practical
linking theme of the attacks against “the vainglory of syllogizing sophistry”2
or “strange and barbarous words”3: “Hobbes's purpose was, of course
to undermine...the discourse of the 'School-Divines', as he called them—in
other words, the theologians whose obscure political terminology, so Hobbes
claimed, was responsible for the recent civil war.”4 The complaints
against the language stem from a larger complaint against the philosophy of
those who use the particular language in question. If one looks at the main
trunk of backlash against current academic neologisms in literature, it is
possible to see a similar desire to “undermine the discourse” of groups who are
attempting to assert a place within the study of literature that has
traditionally been denied them.
R. K Elliott,
in his essay “Metaphor, Imagination and Conceptions of Imagination” discusses
some of the central metaphorical associations that have traditionally been made
with education, discussing several of them in light of their historical
origins. Some of the most common that he picks out are the following:
“education as formation or production; as preparation or apprenticeship; as
initiation; as guidance; as growth; as liberation.”5 About these he
comments that “Each presupposes that education has a point or purpose, and each
is normative in character, indicating what education ought to be by seeming to
state, incompletely, what it essentially is.”6 Even a cursory glance
at a thesaurus yields a panoply of phrases synonymous with education that fit
into Elliott’s categories. A number of these are based on ontological metaphors
that substantiate education (as in “My education in English literature
qualifies me for this job”) or make education into a quantifiable and
qualifiable entity (as in “I received a first-rate education from Harvard”).
Others are based on substantive metaphor that equates education with the
process of teaching and learning (as in “Elementary education is very different
today than it was twenty years ago”).
For example,
the words “edification” (from Latin aedificare,
“making of a temple”) and “instruction” (Latin root struere, meaning “pile up' or “build”) are derived from Latin
metaphors within the paradigm of formation or production. They are certainly
not alone in this status as English has derived a host of other phrases that
commodify and physicalize the concept of education—”building one's future
[through education]” and “making something [better] of one's self” spring
immediately to mind. Especially as the perceived role of colleges and
universities has evolved (for many administrators, educators and students) from
primarily being “the methodological discovery and teaching of truths about
serious and important things”7 to providing an atmosphere for
advanced vocational training of all sorts, the idea of students becoming
“products” of a school has become more commonplace. Likewise, the ideas
expressed by those students are in turn viewed as “products” themselves
(witness the phrase “intellectual property,” which seems to physicalize ideas).
This schema is
not limited to concepts of education in English. The predominant Russian word
for education (“obrazovanie”)
contains the root “obraz-,” which
alternately can mean shape, form, image, way, etc., thereby placing it also
into the “education is formation” schema. The German phrases “bildung” (which, in addition to
“education” can also mean “formation,” “development” or “creation”) and “ausbildung” (often translated as
“training” but more accurately rendered as a specific kind of education, like “bibliotheks-ausbildung” or “librarian's
training”) also work in this model, stemming from the root “bild” or picture. The metaphorical
extension in bildung involves
changing ideas into a formal representation (a picture) of knowledge.
Likewise, the
metaphorical schema of preparation seems to be one that has no end of
metaphorical expressions occurring in English, such as “training,” “exercise,”
“discipline,” or “familiarization”. Each of these expressions in some way
involves introducing a pupil to a concept or skill and making it readily
accessible to him/her by repeated, possibly rigorous contact. Without resorting
to the too-easy joke that this vocabulary explains the repetitive and “by rote”
nature of much traditional education, it is true that these metaphors have
fallen somewhat out of fashion as the client/provider relationship between
pupil and teacher has begun to replace the more medieval notion of novice/adept
(or novice/guru if the more recent parlance of the 1960s is preferable). I do
not wish to make an assertion of superiority of any kind for this latter model,
only to point out that the metaphorical language of the process has followed
along with the redefinition (again using metaphor) of the teacher/student
interaction.
However,
the central metaphor of traditional education is almost certainly the idea of
leading a student down a particular (presumably true) path to knowledge. The
word “education” itself contains this basic meaning (the English word “duct”
springs from the same Latin root as education, ducere, which means “to lead”) and the list of derived metaphors
from this idea is lengthy. From the simple one-word metaphors like “direction,”
“guidance,” “tutelage” or “tutoring” (both of which derive from the Latin verb
for “watching [over]”) to the more elaborate conceptions of “showing/pointing
out/teaching/demonstrating the [proper] way,” educational metaphor is filled
with instances in which a teacher is presented as a Vergil figure corresponding
to the student's role as Dante. Along with this follows the concept of
“enlightenment” as a metaphor for education, since one must presumably “shed
light” on the “proper way” as one leads another down it. Conflated images of
illumination and education date back to ancient times and even provide
historians with a catchy name for the period of European history associated
most closely with the rise of humanist education, i.e. the Enlightenment.
Finally, this metaphor also resembles the “education as initiation” schema,
since leading someone down a path to a desired and normative goal is a fitting
description not only for education in the “guidance” metaphorical schema, but
initiation processes in general.
Reference
to the tenth edition of the Merriam-Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary demonstrates the ubiquity of these three concepts in
the definition of education:
ed·u·cate \e-jƏ-kāt\ vt (15c) 1 a: to provide schooling for b:
to train by formal instruction and supervised practice especially in a skill,
trade, or profession; 2 a: to develop mentally, morally, or
aesthetically especially by instruction b:
to provide with information: INFORM;
3: to persuade or condition
to feel, believe, or act in a desired way. 8
Definition 1 (especially 1b) fits into
the schema of “education as preparation,” whereas definitions 2a and 2b both
are examples of “education as formation.” However, it is in definition 3 that
the root of the whole argument about the nature and language of education takes
center stage. The conflict between differing conceptions of “the desired way”
(the “duct” down which the student is to be led and what he/she will find at
the end of it) is the direct cause of criticism of the language, a situation
which is in turn engendered by conflict between the different philosophies of
higher education that exist today. Elliott writes of the established
educational metaphors:
When we ask concerning the meaning of
these metaphors, their incompleteness and therefore ambiguity becomes apparent.
If education is preparation, for example, it may be preparation for life, or
for work, or for war, or for prayer and the love of one's neighbor.... Every
education might claim to be guidance, but different educational theories have
different ideas about what counts as guidance.... It is not because of their
versatility that they have become prominent in educational discourse, however,
so much as by virtue of their connection with certain well-known theories of
education, for as well as having a free and untrammeled use, they are also used
in such a way that their interpretation is bound to the theory (or type of
theory) of education with which they are most closely associated, and to which,
in some cases, they might be said to belong.9
The remainder of this paper will look
at how just the titles of papers and sessions from last year's MLA conference
are evidence of significant motion toward the “education as guidance [towards a
specific goal]” away from the “education as initiation [into a profession or
other group]” model. Those who use this parlance represent a concept of
education that involves expansion of (rather than simply achievement of) the
“goal” or the “group” of these two metaphorical models.
If
education is understood as initiation, one must certainly ask the question of
what exactly one is being initiated into. In the case of literary study, one is
initiated into a group of people who are familiar with what has come to be
known metaphorically (of course) as “the literary canon.” This term is itself
derived from ecclesiastical law and its etymology dates even further back to
the Greek word, kanōn, meaning “rule.” If we then interpret this idea of being
initiated into the literary canon as learning to follow the “rule” of
literature, it is necessary to look at what that “rule” has generally implied.
Up until the early 1960s, the canon was generally a very white, male and
European collection of writers running the temporal gamut from roughly Beowulf to late Modernist writing.
Literature produced by women, minorities, non-Europeans and other marginalized
groups was generally de-emphasized or excluded entirely, either through social
convention, censorship or professional collusion. As literary study has begun
to expand in order to include the writing of previously excluded groups, it has
had to expand not only its critical vocabulary (hence, feminist criticism,
“queer theory,” post-colonialism, et al.) but also its metaphorical approach to
how it perceives its mission and process. My purpose here is not to take sides
in the issue of whether this expansion of the canon is good or bad, but rather
to discuss the ways in which the various sides of the debate can be identified
merely by examining the language that they use.
With
the expansion of the canon to include any writer deemed to have merit (and
perhaps with the subsequent expansion, courtesy of deconstructionist and new
historicist criticism, to include any writer period) comes an attendant destabilization
of the idea of a firm “rule” about which one is educated in order to be
initiated into the profession of literary study. The “education as initiation”
model is an inward-moving metaphor (see fig. 1 below) in which the learner (L)
moves along a trajectory (T) demonstrated by the educator (E) until he/she
reaches the bounded area of knowledge, or canon (C), into which he/she is to be
initiated.
On the other
hand, the newer concept involves a radical reshaping of the whole metaphorical
framework (see fig. 2). The learner and the educator are much more closely
linked, although the educator still takes on something of a facilitating role.
The trajectory along which they move is now outwardly oriented, with its
leading edge pushing on the boundary of the canon, which now encompasses both
communal, professional knowledge and
personal knowledge of the learner and educator. The bounded area expands as the
trajector pushes on it and surrounds more of the domain area, in this case the
entire possible corpus of literature. The learner and educator “ride” the
trajector together as it expands to include more and more works within its
canon. I will call this metaphorical schema “education as
discovery
[or recovery] and expansion.”
Some
examples of this newer attitude towards the teaching and study of literature
can be clearly seen in some of the following titles (unless otherwise noted,
the titles are individual paper titles) from the MLA convention program:
“Technology, Distance and Collaboration: Problems with Expanding Networked
Pedagogies;”10 “The Computer as Catalyst: Where Do Second Language
Acquisition Research, Cultural Studies and the Less Commonly Taught Languages
Fit In?;”11 “To Transvest, but not to Transgress: Avoiding Deviance
in the Decameron;”12
“Subverting the Norms” (panel title);13 “Border Theory in the Age of
Globalization;”14 “Tightening Belts, Broadening Horizons;”15
“Mainstreaming Mr. Orton;”16 “Teaching Tolerance: Combating Bigotry
in the College Classroom;”17 “Postcolonial Gothic and the New World
Disorder: Crossing Borders of Space and Time in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride;”18 “Conflict, Cooperation, Convergence: A
Roundtable on the Academic and the Nonacademic in Gay, Lesbian and Queer Print
Culture” (panel title);19 “No Sage on the Stage: Collaborating with
Graduate Students in Teaching Literature;”20 “Reorient(aliz)ing the Renaissance” (panel
title);21 “The Globalization of ‘Culture’: Perspectives from Three
Fields” (panel title);22 “Evaluating without Assimilating;”23 “Doctors Without Borders: Professing an
Imagined Community of Written English Language;”24 “Recovering Lost
Poetry by Nineteenth-Century American Women: Rethinking Why Women Wrote;”25
“Tolerating Theory;”26 “The Moral and Social Ramifications of the
Reelitification of Public Higher Education;”27 “Unearthing the
Atwood Canon” (panel title);28 “The ‘Deviant’ Classroom: A
Roundtable Discussion on Inclusive Higher Education;”29 “Finding a
Place for Kristeva and Transference Love in Pedagogy;”30 “Promoting
Multicultural Education through Creative Writing: Crossing Cultures and
Genders;”31 “Bridging the Gap: A Comparative Methodology for Third
World Literary Criticism;”32 “Reading Our (Br)Others;”33
“Become the ‘Other’: China’s Challenge to American Teachers.”34
These are only a few examples (after all there are several thousand
presentations annually at MLA) and only represent the “education as discovery”
model. There are an equal, if not greater, number of titles that reflect the
traditional conception of what literary scholarship is intended to accomplish.
However, examination of the language used in this data set does lead to some
preliminary conclusions.
An
admission of possible problems with this analysis is in order. The data I am
using is not, in the strictest sense, a vocabulary of educational practice in
the way that most of the accepted terms that illustrate the traditional
metaphorical schema are. Rather, the titles I have chosen to include from the
MLA represent some of the results of applying a different educational ideology
to the available raw material (literary texts). In essence, this is a secondary
step, but I believe it to be a logical argument that the product of scholarship
is necessarily shaped, if not defined, by the primary metaphorical conception of
scholarship and education. For example, if I conceive of my education as a
“collaborative (between myself and an educator) unearthing of ideas beyond the border of my knowledge” it
seems logical to me to believe that I will express my findings about literature
in language that reflects this central metaphor. Alternately, if I perceive of
my education as “being guided by someone else into an established body of knowledge,” there is an inherent
contradiction between my conception and the notions of “transgressing,”
“discovering,” “unearthing,” “bridging a gap,” “finding a place for,” or any of
the other spatial metaphors used in the examples above. For example, if one
believes the writing of Venedikt Erofeev or Wole Soyinka or Thomas Pynchon or
Kathy Acker not to be a part of (or to be outside)
the canon, then there is really no question of “finding a place” in the canon for their work. Such an
action is by definition impossible if one’s canon is rigid and definitively
bounded.
The
terms found in the examples from the MLA meeting demonstrate a distinct
rejection of the ideas that only what is inside
the canon is worthy of examination (i.e. teaching, since all these papers
presumably are part of educating the body of literary scholars). Words and
phrases such as “the other,” “borders” (often paired with “crossings”),
“transgressions,” “tolerance” and any of the myriad “re-“ phrases
(“rethinking,” “revisioning,” “reexamining,” “revisiting,” etc.) all demand
validity for perspectives or subject matter that are rejected by traditional
ideas of canon. These ideas are often explicitly named by their proponents as
“deviant,” “queer,” “alternative,” or “outside,” words that associate them with
notions of exclusion from the norm. The fact that each of these four words has
also taken on a figurative and metaphorical gravity in critical discourse
should not come as much of a surprise given this divergence of perception.
Notably, most of the terminology used by these scholars’ titles employs
physical metaphor to describe the status of their work in relation to the
canon. All of the articles, by dint of their very existence as products of
literary scholars (those already initiated), implicitly demand recognition as
part of the canon. However, their subject matter is often excluded from the
canon and their language reflects this exclusion by using physical metaphor to
situate it outside the traditional bounded area of literary study. The
necessity of this contemporaneous insider/outsider scholarly stance (and
resulting language) demonstrates that resistance to the ideas represented is
alive and well. This resistance is often represented by the scornful, almost
Hobbesian denunciations of the language (and, by extension, the ideas) of those
who discuss non-canonical works, writers or critical approaches (cf. Lutz or
Sokal and Bricmont,35 although neither deals explicitly with
literary study).
When the ideas
of being an “insider” writing about something “outside” are conflated, the
schema of education represented by figure 2 is brought into play. No longer is
the canon rigid and no longer is the motion of either educator or learner
inward. Rather any person that can lay a claim to being an educator or a
learner within the field is able to push the boundary of the canon outward. Whether
or not this model holds in the case of a complete novice writing in an entirely
non-canonical way about literature is unclear, as there are not many instances
of this happening. I suspect there is still some kind of authoritative status
required to be able to start pushing at the boundaries, but it may be as simple
as collaborating with someone else of authority. This leads to a sort of
infinite regression of authority that I do not have the answers for, but is
ultimately no less satisfactory an answer than that given by the canon-keepers,
whose standards are equally (if not more) obscure.
Ultimately,
the “education as initiation” schema implies a rigid canon, since the
conception of education which it embodies implies a unidirectional flow of
established knowledge from teacher (member) to learner (initiate). The
expansion of the canon requires the consent of the membership in this
conception, a process that the MLA perfectly demonstrates is neither quick nor
easy. As the concept of “co-learners” or “collaborative education” begins to
become more accepted, the language of educational processes and products is
likely to follow suit. A glance through professional journals of education
(especially those involving technology, like On the Horizon) demonstrates the vogue that these terms are gaining
in current theory. I will leave it both to time and to others more qualified to
determine whether or not this is a good thing, but the change in metaphor has
already arrived.
NOTES
1. Peter Burke, “The Jargon of the Schools,” in Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language,
ed. by Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1995), 22.
2. John Webster, quoted in Burke, 32.
3. Thomas Hobbes, quoted in Burke, 31.
4. Burke, 23.
5. R. K. Elliott, “Metaphor, Imagination and Conceptions of Education,”
in Metaphors of Education, ed. by
William Taylor (London: Heinemann, 1984), 38.
6. Elliott, 38-39.
7. Edward Shils, The Calling of
Education: The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on Higher Education
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 3.
8. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary, 10th ed. (Springfield,
MA: Merriam-Webster, 1997), 367.
9. Elliott, 39-40.
10. Modern Language Association. “Program of the 1998 Convention, San
Francisco, California, 27-30 December,” PMLA:
Publications of the Modern Language Association 113 (1998), 1314.
11. Ibid., 1315.
12. Ibid., 1317.
13. Ibid., 1320.
14. Ibid., 1324.
15. Ibid., 1325.
16. Ibid., 1325.
17. Ibid., 1326.
18. Ibid., 1327.
19. Ibid., 1327.
20. Ibid., 1344.
21. Ibid., 1346.
22. Ibid., 1356.
23. Ibid., 1364.
24. Ibid., 1365.
25. Ibid., 1381.
26. Ibid., 1383.
27. Ibid., 1385.
28. Ibid., 1385.
29. Ibid., 1399.
30. Ibid., 1401.
31. Ibid., 1402.
32. Ibid., 1403.
33. Ibid., 1404.
34. Ibid., 1406.
35. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable
Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (New York: Picador
USA, 1998).