Author: Santa
Title: What you say is what you get: metaphor analysis of
Journal: Politicheskaia lingvistika.
Year: 2007
Volume: 21
Pages: 96-114
Language of publication: English
Full text
Santa Ana O.
WHAT YOU
SAY IS WHAT YOU GET:
METAPHOR
ANALYSIS OF
In this article I offer an empirical study of how the
To gauge public discourse, I sample print media in two
ways. My research team comprehensively sampled the Los Angeles Times for a two-year period leading up to the vote on
the referendum to obtain a deep assessment of the local and regional public
discourse. Additionally, for a broad sample of
SITUATING
THIS STUDY AMONG DISCOURSE STUDIES OF EDUCATION. In line with the
late 20th century "linguistic turn" in social theory
(Chilton 1996, pp. 37-40; Fairclough 1989, p. 13), educational scholars have
responded with focused attention on the discourse of their profession. Two of
the toolsets that scholars have used in this task are critical discourse
analysis and the cognitive metaphor theory. Regarding the first,
Regarding the second toolset, the fundamental claim of
metaphor theory can be stated as succinctly. People do not make sense of their
surroundings in terms of logic and reason. Instead, images make up a central
part of human thought. Humans build their concepts of the world in terms of
images. In text and speech, this image formation function is expressed by means
of metaphor.
Metaphor analysis of public education has taken several
forms. From a literary point of view, Danahy (1986)
offered an early study of the education profession's use of metaphor to
characterize second language students. More recently, Guerra (1998) employed
cognitive science's tools on the metaphors educators use to conceptualize literacy.
With the first set of tools, Kumarvadivelu
(1999) analyzed classroom discourse critically, while Fennimore (2000) builds
on Postman & Weingartner's (1969) institutional
"semantic environment" concept. Fennimore presents a treatment on the
totality of language used by teachers in schools as creating a "language
environment" which has significant impact on student outcomes, which
compound the difficulty of non-mainstream students. As in metaphor studies,
these latter scholars have focused on the discourses of educational professionals-not
everyday people.
In contrast to the foregoing studies, I offer a study
of the American public's conversation about education. Many scholars have
previously studied the public discourse of education in various ways, although
they have not used cognitive metaphor theory linked to critical discourse
analysis. Noguera (1995) compares the public
testimony regarding school desegregation in two cities in which the public
education discourse has shifted from explicit discussions centered on race to
the implicit terms of school safety and academic standards. Noguera
bases his analysis on race and racialization concepts
of Omi & Winant (1987), among other
non-linguistic frameworks. From yet another angle, some anthropological
linguists have recently focused their attention on speaker linguistic awareness
and on both referential and non-referential language functions. Silverstein
defines language awareness as "sets of beliefs about language articulated
by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure
and use" (quoted in Kroskrity 2000, p. 5).
In the present article, I study the semantic expression
in language using prose metaphor as the unit of measure. I claim that key
conceptual metaphors articulate an underlying of American ideology of public
education. In contrast, language ideology studies by linguistic anthropologists
focus on the characterization of language, such as American English, as a key
symbol of language ideology. Four aspects define their work. First,
"language ideologies represent the perception of language and discourse
that is constructed in the interest of specific social and cultural group"
(Kroskrity, 2000, p. 8); Second, "language
ideologies are profitably conceived as multiple...within sociocultural
groups that have potential to produce divergent perspectives expressed as
indices of group membership" (ibid.,
p. 12). Third, "members [of sociocultural
groups] may display varying degrees of awareness of local language
ideologies" (ibid., p. 18). Lastly, "members' language ideologies mediate between social
structures and forms of talk" (ibid.,
p. 21).
While I focus in this article on the metaphorization of public education, I share with language
ideology scholars their first and last assertions. I took special interest in
their second assertion and looked specifically for ideological diversity in
Cognitive metaphor theory and critical discourse
analysis have previously been combined to study the public's conversation about
education. Luke (1995–1996) used critical discourse analysis to reveal the
subject positioning and reading positioning in several distinct teaching
settings, including a Sunday school teacher's interaction with primary
school-aged children, teacher talk in a fourth grade of Aboriginal and
Anglo-Australian students, and one possible reading by a teacher of an official
school guidebook. Gee (1999) playfully teaches the pervasiveness of discourse
as a buttress of social structure, and the wide range of social science disciplines
that have responded to the "linguistic turn," by offering
illuminating illustrations of both classroom and non-classroom discourse in his
masterful text on discourse analysis. Finally, Miller & Fredericks (1990)
employed metaphor theory to establish the implicit ideological stance of the authors
of the highly influential 1983 report, A
Nation at Risk, which has been credited with initiating the American crisis
mode for public education.
In the present study, I integrate within critical
discourse analytic framework (as does
THE
SETTING AND ANALYSIS OF A POLITICALLY-CHARGED DISCOURSE. During the 1990s in
Because I am a Chicano social scientist, the findings
of my research on politicized topics such as
Proposition 227 are frequently read with more than average professional
skepticism. Critical discourse analysis expressly purports to be both a
scientific and normative enterprise (
First I prevented selectional
bias with a series of steps. Having established Proposition 227 as the topic of
investigation, I decided to use newspaper texts as my source of public
discourse on this topic. I chose to use making the massive commercially
produced electronic database, LexisNexis®, because it independently indexes the
newspaper articles it archives. I wanted to gather articles both intensively
(many articles from one newspaper) and extensively (articles from across the
country). To do this, I designed two kinds of searches, with prior decisions on
both the range of dates, and the streams of public discourse on which to draw.
By using a Boolean formula that included the previously determined time frame
and print sources, with one keystroke I could electronically download a
complete set of independently indexed newspaper articles. This large set of
news articles became the sample of public discourse that my team analyzed in
this article. Because I did not create the index of articles, and because every
news article in this sample was analyzed, the data was not cherry-picked. That
is, this analysis is based on a comprehensive examination of the data sample.
To preclude the second criticism of biased interpretation,
I personally did not read or analyze major portions of the news texts. Instead,
I established a research protocol so that different groups of readers would do
the reading and interpreting for me. I trained UCLA undergraduate students in
the basics of critical discourse analysis and metaphor theory, using articles from
the sports and business sections of newspapers. By introducing them to theory
and method using unrelated news articles, I avoid inadvertently shaping their
judgments regarding the metaphors that appeared in the Proposition 227 news articles.
Each reader was trained to identify conceptual
metaphors–the object of this investigation – and to code the source and target
domains of each text instance of a metaphor. To use the terminology of Lakoff
and
For the intensive assessment of a single source of
public discourse, different teams of readers completely coded the full sample
totaling 113 articles indexed "Proposition 227" that appeared in the Los Angeles Times over a two-year period
leading up to the referendum vote, between June 1996 and July 1998. The Times was selected because it is the
newspaper with the greatest distribution in
The Los Angeles
Times was selected for intensive analysis because it is one of a handful of
In 2003 LexisNexis® catalogued over forty news sources it
called "major newspapers." My team downloaded articles appearing from
May 1996 to June 1998 from the following papers: Chicago Sun-Times, Daily News (New York), Omaha
World-Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Boston
Globe, Boston Herald, Denver Post, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Houston
Chronicle, New York Times, Plain Dealer, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle
Times, Washington Post, and USA TODAY.
Each newspaper article instance of a metaphor was thus intersubjectively analyzed, which means that more than one
person made free judgments about the source and target domains. The readers initially
had a great deal of variation in the terms used to code the target and source
semantic domain of each instance of a metaphor, since the authors provided
minimum guidance for the labeling. However, readers of the same articles easily
recognized the same instances of metaphors in the article, and negotiated an
appropriate label for sources and targets. In the end, consensus was achieved
for well over 90% of instances of metaphors initially located in the
Proposition 227 news article sample. Once the groups of readers came to
consensus on each text instance of a metaphor in the downloaded sample of news
texts, my team discussed various possible classifications of similar metaphors.
Public discourse metaphors tend to be either occasional
or productive. Occasional metaphors are semantically unrelated to other
metaphors, appearing in one or two linguistic expressions, and carry little
constitutive weight. On the other hand, productive metaphors are not limited to
a finite set of linguistic phrases. They occur in a multitude of forms. When
used to depict crucial political concepts, they are linked to other
semantically related concepts in well-rehearsed narratives that recite
commonplace aspects of our world. When they become conventionalized, these
tropes constitute and legitimate particular forms of institutional structure,
in this case,
AMERICAN
PUBLIC EDUCATION METAPHORS. I find that
What is a School? The
pivotal conceptual metaphor guiding our understanding of public education
revolves around the notion of school. In the 1840s, at the height of the
American industrial age, the most exciting new institution on the scene became
the frame of reference for the new notion of public education. At the outset of
the 21st century, this metaphor still represents schools as the manufacturing
centers of an educated citizenry: school
as factory. Many of the key semantic elements that we commonly
understand to constitute a factory are imposed on the constituents of the
school – the students, the teaching
process, the teachers, and the precepts and standards for running the school.
In the metaphor database developed to study public discourse on public
education, the following excerpts from the Los
Angeles Times were located. Each of the numbered verbatim excerpts in this
article, except when otherwise noted, is from the Los Angeles Times 1993–1998. In the following instances from news reports
that exemplify the school as factory
metaphor:
1. "The first batch of students is tested" (
2. "drill
more English into nonfluent students" (
3. "I am telling [teachers], 'You know in
my heart that I am your friend, but, collectively, we simply have to produce a better product,'" [said
4. "a two-year
study to measure the effectiveness of these [educational]
programs." (
[[Please
note in these excerpts that quoted passages retain the original quotation
diacritics. To keep the excerpts brief, we added text in [brackets] to clarify
the propositional content of each excerpt.]] The factory metaphor is expressed in many forms, such as:
5. 'Plenty of us do not feel this [ESL
program] is running smoothly (
6. training teachers to spot the initial signs
of reading problems and fix them (
7. The proposed overhaul of…bilingual education (
8. revamp the way [a school] teaches students (
9. dismantle language programs (
10.
teacher shortages (
11.
scrapping bilingual instruction (
Everyday metaphor, as casually used in commonplace
public texts, is a crucial measure of the way that public discourse articulates
and reproduces societal relations. Although at first, these metaphoric expressions
might seem to be no more than rhetorical flourishes of minor importance, the
centrality of metaphor in the construction of the social order is vigorously
argued in cognitive theories. In fact the view that metaphor is merely ornamentation
results from the belief that metaphoric understanding is derivative of literal
expression, and that metaphor is consequently a marginal element in the material
of discourse. Rejection of the ornamental evaluation of prose metaphor is
keeping with the linguistic turn in the social sciences. The intellectual
origin of this view that language and discourse have great import in the organization
of the social world can be traced back in the German tradition to the
linguistic anthropologist
To estimate the social impact of a public discourse
metaphor, we can look at the semantics that are imposed on the target semantic
domain, school, by the meaning structure of the semantic
source domain, factory. Metaphor
theorists have argued that a constitutive metaphor underpins and validates
worldviews that are consistent with its source semantic domain (Lakoff, 1990, 1993; Gibbs, 1994).
Accordingly, we appraise the social effects that the metaphor establishes, in
this case, the American public understandings of its public schools. Consider
the notions of the semantic source domain factory
that are imposed on the notion of school.
This should be familiar
since evidence of the factory is found everywhere in today's world, and people
take its function and its products for granted. Factories produce all kinds of
objects, from vitamin pills to automobiles. Factories of all kinds share many
properties. For example, these products are standardized, so that a newly produced
dry board eraser or school bus is indistinguishable from another. When the
metaphor circulates in public discourse, the commonly shared semantics of factory are automatically impressed on
our understanding of schools.
It is understood that in factories, the production
process of such commodities has been broken down into its components and
systematized. Machines are linked together by conveyor belts. The cheap raw
material entering the factory is carried along on conveyor belts from one
machine to another. Each machine performs a sequence of tasks. Factory workers
dot the assembly line. Each worker also performs a narrowly defined activity in
the fabrication of the finished product. The workers execute their bit of the
manufacturing process over and over in elementary routines. Repetition and boredom,
rather than creativity and ingenuity, is characteristic of factory jobs.
What is a School child? What is Learning?
Following the entailments of school
as factory, today's public understanding of learning is identical to the
view held by
"'Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and
girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. …You can only form the
minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service
to them.' …The speaker, and schoolmaster, and the third grown person present,
all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little
vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of
facts poured into them until they were filled to the brim" (Dickens, 1854,
p. 1).
Gradgrind, patron
of a self-proclaimed model urban school in 1850, expounds an obsolete view of
learning and students that
On the other side, educational constructivist theorists
hold the view that each student constructs his/her own knowledge. In this
model, teachers are not knowledge blacksmiths or computer programmers. The
teacher is a facilitator, assisting students build
their own knowledge. Knowledge is a construct created by each learner; it is
not external to the child. Even '1 + 1 = 2' must be constructed by each child
in order for it to become his or her own knowledge. The child is far more
dynamic, constructivists would argue, with the knowledge
as construct metaphor than within the traditional viewpoint that
knowledge consists of discrete external facts.
The debate between mechanists and constructivists was
engaged in professional educational circles decades ago. It deserves greater
media coverage, because of its important implications for American public education.
If the American public were exposed to these fundamental metaphors, it would be
possible for the public to reconsider how to best educate
Mechanistic metaphors
for learning go uncontested in public discourse, guiding the operationalization of American public schooling today. The
orthodoxy is taken as given in
One way to gauge the power of orthodox metaphors to
guide popular understanding of learning is to trace the verbs used to
characterize students and teachers. Using the corpus of articles appearing May
1996–June 1998 from many different newspapers, we tested the conceptualization
of student as a passive recipient of education by comparing the use of the
verbs: teach and learn. This search was narrower. We downloaded the articles
retrieved in two searches for all articles from "major newspapers,"
as defined by LexisNexis, that have a headline including the phrase Proposition 227, between May 1996 and
June 1998. We used the following Boolean conditions:
• All headlines containing
within the same sentence the root word learn
plus any of the root words student or
child or kid
• All headlines containing within the same
sentence the root word teach or educate or taught plus the root words student or child or kid
The first search retrieved 95 articles with the word teach (and its derivatives such as taught, teaching, but not teacher).
The second obtained 51 articles with the word learn and its verbal derivatives). To begin, the gross measure (of
95 versus 51 articles) indicates that public discourse discussions in this wide
distribution of newspapers far more often address the activity of adults,
rather than child learning. When teach
is used, moreover, the education professionals are explicitly considered active
agents, while students are recipients of the actions of the educators. A few examples
are provided for illustration:
12.
hundreds of thousands of immigrant children who will at last be taught English when the school year
(New York Times,
13.
Teachers who heed parents' explicit requests to teach their children
English need (New York Times,
14.
theory of bilingual education is that non-English speaking children are taught in their native
language until they are proficient enough to be taught in English (
15.
They claimed their children were being taught no English. (Financial
Times,
In these excerpts
(which centered on bilingual education and English language acquisition), the
student does not learn English, he or she is taught it. The language they end
up speaking is seen not to be a consequence of normal language acquisition
processes, but is the product of teaching. In public discourse across the
If alternative frameworks for speaking about the
learning process were available in public discourse, such as constructivism
(much less social practice!), then we would expect a greater portion of all educational
professional/student relations to be expressed with such terms. In discussions
of classroom activities (as well as of cognitive aspects of learning), the
child would be the active agent, and the educational professional would be a
learning promoter. Today's public discourse on education constitutes teachers
as agents and students as recipients of their learning.
Looking more closely at the 51 articles that contained
derivatives of the verb learn, one
can further qualify these public discourse references to learning. At times
they refer to decontextualized cognitive processes.
News reports on studies of cognition (as for example, cognition is associated
with bilingualism) were grouped in this search. Additionally, learn verbs were at times teamed up with
teach verbs,
such as in:
16.
But what
Rojas was declaring, in essence, was that he would rather go to jail than work
to teach young children to learn English
in a year. (San
17.
"If
the schools don't teach them English,
how are they going to learn it?" (Plain Dealer,
18.
"The
idea that children best learn English by
teaching them only in Spanish doesn't have a lot of evidence to support
it." (
Consequently, in this subset of the sampled American
public discourse, learning generally presumes instructor agency. In the news
articles that focus on classroom activities, the student is the passive
recipient of a teacher's activity. To reiterate, this is not just a matter of
semantics. Cognitive linguistic research demonstrates that prose metaphor
reveals worldview (Lakoff, 1993). Talking, which is often dismissed as separate
from the construction of social reality, encodes key components of the
structures of the social world. As
As for the manufacturing process, the school as factory metaphor is entirely
consistent with traditional metaphors that conceptualize passive pupils who are
mechanistically taught extrinsic facts, rather than learning by constructing
knowledge for themselves. Moreover, one implication of the concordant blending
of the factory metaphor and
mechanistic metaphors for learning is that no important learning occurs outside
of the school as factory walls. It
is as if the child enters the school inert, mute, without thought, with no
understanding of the world.
While the child is a passive object, the factory is
portrayed as the active agent in the educational process. In many instances,
the word drill signals this metaphor.
Consequently the educational institution and teachers are seen as furnishing,
shaping or otherwise regulating children with educational skills: "Classes will be geared toward fostering skills"
(Los Angeles Times,
19.
"The
federal government's own Goals 2000…calls for every
adult American to have the math and language 'skills necessary to compete in a global economy. It's crucial to
this country's economic survival'" (
20.
"I'm
for English fluency because it is an essential tool to function in the marketplace." (
Yet in the dominant
metaphor of the discourse on education, even particular skills are imparted to
passive children. In the following excerpts, note the passive verbs associated
with the academic skills that children in fact achieve:
21.
"[A
school] system they contend fails to give
students the language skills needed to advance in society" (
22.
"The
program seeks to … provide tools to
help them integrate into society." (
When we move outward from the mechanistic teaching
sphere to the sphere of the site of the school
as factory, today's students are
unthinkingly considered to be the raw material fed into the factory, or as educational
theorist
Academic tracking is also conceptualized in terms of
the factory metaphor. Tracking, in
its manufacturing context, expedites administrative scheduling problems of
assigning students to classrooms and teachers. Note that the word tracking is semantically compatible with the semantic domain of the school as factory metaphor in reference
to assembly-line transport of factory product through a set of manufacturing
steps along a conveyor belt. If the public's thinking is limited to the school as factory constituting metaphor,
tracking makes sense. From this
point of view, tracking optimizes the resources of a school that has to contend
with hundreds, even thousands, of students. It is more efficient to place
so-called fast children in educational fast tracks while consigning so-called
slow children to slow tracks.
If the child, particularly the socially marginalized
child, is granted the central frame of reference, then the dangers of tracking
are easier to perceive. It has been demonstrated in a series of studies that
tracking establishes a self-fulfilling prophesy which reduces the long-term
educational advancement of the student, particularly the child whose familial
background does not correspond to the mainstream middle-class Anglo-American
upbringing (Rist 1970). Most disturbingly, the
tracking decision most often takes place based on minimal interchange between a
teacher and a child. Once relegated to the slow track, teachers' lower expectations
lead to lower achievement levels on child's part, which confirms the original
prediction and most often seals the educational fate of the child. Academic
development and the highest levels of social advancement are refused to these
children when they are relegated to the least valued tracks on the schoolhouse
factory floor (Oakes 1985). Thus, they are unjustly denied equal educational
opportunity (Anyon 1980).
What are School Teachers? Teachers on the schoolhouse as factory floor become
factory workers whose training, skills, and activities are circumscribed. The
profession is no longer highly esteemed. Much has been written about the
effects of industrialization on people's occupation. The master craftsperson of
earlier times had cumulative knowledge to build a unique finished product from
start to finish. With industrialization, this knowledge is broken down to its
components, and meted out in pieces to the teacher who now rehearses the role
of assembly line workers. In the factory workers repeatedly perform only a
single step in the manufacturing of a standardized product. Thus with this
metaphor, images of factory-trained instructors, who perform a limited set of
tasks mechanically on thousands of students, replace the image of erudite and
scholarly educator, who discharges his/her venerable profession edifying and
cultivating students over a long period of time (Apple 1999). In his 1986
study, Danahy noted the use of artisan metaphors
where the teacher's function as a potter, is "to mold lifeless lumps of
clay into something shapely, beautiful and human." He points out these can
be subsumed in the machine metaphor since "in a modern industrial economy,
it comes as no surprise to discover metaphors which are related, but draw
instead on mechanical production to clarify, justify or rectify what we
do" (p. 229).
Teachers should not be blamed for their place in the
schoolhouse factory. They have resisted their debased position in society
throughout the past century. On the floor of the 1901 National Education
Association convention, noted educational labor activist Margaret Haley warned
against "factoryizing" education, which
made 'teachers into automatons "whose duty it is to carry out mechanically
and unquestioningly the ideas and orders of those clothed with the authority of
position"' (Bradley, 1999, p. 31).
Evidence abounds that teachers now comprise a
blue-collar labor force, not a class of professionals. The National Education
Association and American Federation of Teachers may be described as professional
guilds, but they function like industrial labor unions. They organize the
rank-and-file, negotiate bread-and-butter issues, conduct work stoppages, and
sign collective-bargaining contracts. Although these unions promote professional
development, peer-quality monitoring and other professional society interests,
their most important purpose is to obtain fair compensation for labor
performed, namely salaries, benefits, grievance procedures, and so forth. They
do not operate like the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association.
Teachers have been aptly dubbed "United Mind Workers" (Kerchner, et al.,
1997).
Finally, consider the standard of success for schools,
as factories. In 19th century
23.
"[A
superintendent] said he will appoint a special task force to study the overall effectiveness of bilingual education
here" (
24.
"Gangs
not as an invading army but as our own offspring-the byproduct of a polarized
economy, ineffective schools,
[etc.]" (
25.
"Bilingual
programs are only as good and effective as
the principal, the teachers and the parents at that school." (
It must be emphasized that effectiveness, or efficiency,
namely a high ratio of output to input, is not a necessary standard for
educational institutions. The words efficiency
and effective are etymologically
related. Respectively, their sources are Latin present and past participles of efficiere. The
root of this word, in turn, facere means 'to make'. Had another metaphor been chosen,
then another success standard would have applied. For example, a personal
quality, such as intellectualism or doctrinarism, has been the standard for
schools based on a church model. Seminaries are set up on this model. Likewise,
the standard has been regimentarianism for military
academies. Note once again that the efficiency standard in the public school as
factory is entirely compatible
with the mechanistic metaphors that constitute the American public's theory of
student learning. The semantic congruence of these metaphors contributes to
their persistence.
The implications are huge. Within this model, children
are not inherently valuable subjects, but passive recipients of their education.
Worst, they become commodities. As they enter school, they are only as valuable
as they conform to predetermined quality-control standards. Educational failure
is presumed to be due to a student's inferior personal qualities, or that
child's cultural background. The practices of the institution are not faulted,
and its principles rarely questioned. Public education may not be based on
profit, like a factory, but
Business metaphor. Another
metaphor is often extolled in public discourse as a novel, even revolutionary
metaphor for thinking about public schools: education
as business. In our post-industrial age, this metaphor is more
frequently used to evaluate the quality of education, in terms of
profitability, rather than efficiency. In educational circles, certainly, this
way of thinking about schooling is recognized as nothing new. Applying concepts
of business ideology to American public schools such as "rational
management" and "efficiency" has occurred since the 1890s. (See Callahan (1962). In
Before turning to the second major constitutive
metaphor for education, an alarming feature of the recent public discourse on
education must be presented.
Warehouse metaphor.The
Consequently, an identifiable hazard threatens today's
American school-aged children. In particular the inner-city schoolchild is
treated as if she is a second-rate commodity. For many years, the children of
blue-collar, immigrant, and racialized parents have
been consigned to the slowest tracks of the schoolhouse as factory. Now they
are taken off that conveyor belt, and relocated off the factory floor. Heaped together,
without even the guise of receiving an education, they are placed in substandard
facilities under the surveillance of overworked storeroom staff. Consider the
following excerpts:
26.
"The
children in
27.
"The
rampage of angry youth who spent their childhood warehoused in 2,000-plus student holding tanks will continue" (
28.
"Black
and brown kids who have been warehoused by an education
system." (
To advance along the
I began this analysis of current American public
discourse on education at the schoolhouse level, with the entailments of the factory metaphor. A crucial liability of
this metaphor is its implicit reinforcement of outdated mechanistic models of
learning. Moreover, educational programs are conceived, implemented, and
evaluated based on the efficiency metric, rather than on the basis of student
academic potential. The student is viewed as "a unit of economic
utility." Consequently, the student is not the ultimate measure of
organizational success. It is as if toasters are being manufactured. This
metaphor is not useful in so far as people are not merchandise.
The metaphoric basis of public education discourse in
What is Curriculum? In the
public understanding of education, the child proceeds step-by-step in a sequence
of classes and grades toward the end of becoming an educated person. The major
metaphor that is revealed by a systematic review of over one hundred articles
is the curriculum as path
metaphor. The path is a common metaphor that is used in many aspects of human
life. The course of human life is just
one example. In education, the curriculum
(< Latin currere
'to run') is the established set of courses that a student has to take to
become educated in a specific topic.
The elements of the semantic source domain, path, that are most often associated
with the target domain, curriculum,
include the unidirectional "movement" of an individual
"toward" a progression of goals. Another element of the metaphor is
its association with individual volition, namely that the person moves along
the path by his or her own actions. Note that none of these conventional associations
are obligatory aspects of education. Recall that although this is presently
taken to be self-evident, as a metaphoric basis for student education, the path is not naturally the single way to
conceive of curriculum. Two alternatives will be taken up at the end of the
article.
In the curriculum
as path metaphor, there are many expressions of directional movement of
a person's education, as exemplified in the following:
29.
"Opponents
contend the [bilingual education] program … will almost certainly hurt the academic progress of limited-English students"
(
30.
"For
many of these impressionable foreign-born teens, the passage through the bilingual program is about far more than just
learning English" (
31.
"Last
year, 1150 schools around the state with non-English-speaking students failed
to advance a single student into
English fluency. A third of schools failing to advance any students to English fluency were teaching only in
English." (
Also note other instances of the ubiquitous curriculum as path metaphor elsewhere in
this article, such as compete and advance. These terms all imply
significant voluntary effort on the part of the individual student.
Apart from the student's progression in stages toward
some goal, another central feature is a prescribed series of impediments along
the educational path. These impediments are an expected part of the process toward
the goal of becoming an educated person:
32.
"'If
we set the bar of standards so high
that a student must pole-vault over
it', [a teachers union official] said, 'we
must also give the student a pole'" (
33.
"Students
like Guillen must pass a final battery of exams before graduating" (
34.
"Some
'latchkey kids' come home and dutifully plow
through their homework."
homework (
A further feature
of the curriculum as path metaphor
is that the progress toward that goal of being educated takes place at a
certain pace, and that progress is an attribute of the child's
success, as illustrated in the following excerpts:
35.
"Many
language experts…believe that children fall
behind when they are taught academic subjects in a language they are still
learning" (Los Angeles Times,
36.
"Right
now what we need to do is get our
young people back on track" (
37.
"Her
four children…would have been set back
if they had been thrust into English-based classes in the primary grades"
(
38.
"Extensive
research by Oakes into the progress
of Latino students in public schools has shown that they are consistently routed into the least academic courses of study, beginning in
elementary school. That so-called
'tracking' is worse for bilingual-program students." (
As the second of the three dominant metaphors in
contemporary public discourse on education, it is appropriate to review the path semantic domain. The semantic
domain of the path includes an embodied
experience of walking along a trail or track to some destination. The everyday
frame of understanding of this semantic domain entails a starting point, an
endpoint, a route to be traversed possibly with some impediments, and a sense
of directedness on the part of the walker to follow the path toward the
endpoint. The mapping of the semantic domain of path
onto the domain of curriculum
imposes a well-developed framework of everyday embodied knowledge of walking
path onto a crucial aspect of a central institution of human life. The mapping
includes the following correspondences: Education corresponds to a walking
pathway. It has a beginning corresponding to a state of being uneducated, a
route to traverse corresponding to an established set of courses (= routes) and a succession of grades (= slopes or gradients of increasing difficulty). There are
expected impediments to overcome that correspond to formal batteries of evaluation
that require demonstrated mastery of the curriculum of each grade. Lastly there
is a destination corresponding to the completion of the curriculum of a school
system, leading to the graduation of the student, certifying achievement of the
status of an educated person.
When path
is used to conceptualize curriculum, each person (metaphorically) undertakes a
journey from the position of an uneducated person toward the place of an
educated person. All these topological elements are employed in the curriculum as path metaphor in the
public discourse on education.
Misleading Entailment: Personal
Volition. This metaphor contains three associated elements of
inherent logic. First, education within this metaphoric configuration is
attained one step at a time. Second, a succession of grades must be passed
along the way. Three and most importantly, an education is attained by one's
own motivation. These built-in logical assertions of the curriculum as path metaphor play a
central role in its constitutive function. They foreground the volition of the
individual path taker, and background all structural factors that make up the
social environment of the American public school. As a result, the metaphor
projects a distorted image of actual process of
This entailment draws off all the differences that make
each person's schooling experience unique. This has tragic political
consequences in an American institution that copes with massive structural
inequity. First, when the path metaphor is used, the
Note that an element of the commonplace understanding
of a factory, namely manufacturing
standardization, reinforces the false entailment that the curricular path of
every public school child is indistinguishable for all practical purposes. Of
course, this is not the case. Still, this personal volition entailment strips
classroom content and process, as well as institutional context, of all educational
relevance. It is as if every elementary student walks along identical
educational paths. It makes the middle school child responsible for the institutional
failings that our society imposes on her. The entailment readily dissociates
the institutional strictures and social obstacles that a disadvantaged school
student has to overcome. It also detaches the privileged student from all the
material advantages that his or her wealth accrues. The personal volition
entailment is grossly untrue, and yet is reinforced each time the path metaphor is invoked. With this
metaphor, the implication is only two things determine each educational success
or failure: talent and sweat.
Consider the conceptual source of a very common term in
public education. The commonly used term drop
out, as a noun or verb, appeared
135 times in the 113 Los Angeles Times articles that were indexed for
Proposition 227. Dropout is an Americanism
that came into general use in the 1920s (Chapman, 1995) when industrialism was
in its heyday. Although it might not have been obvious just a moment ago, once
attention is focused on the path
metaphor, the term readily communicates an image of a runner giving up the educational
foot race. Again, nothing in dropping out
refers to the structural factors that push a student out of school. The
alternative term, push out, assigns
agency of schoolchild attrition squarely to the responsible adults in the public
schools. This term is only used by a small set of progressive educational
scholars.
In short, all structural difficulties that impair the
education of language-minority and working-class children tend to be overlooked
in the story that curriculum as path
narrates. Instead, internal fortitude alone brings triumph or failure. Although
this deceptive entailment of the dominant metaphor has been definitely
repudiated in scientific studies and eloquently disputed in American social
commentary, such as the searing study of two immigrant students (Valdés, 1998) or Laura Angélica Simón's
1995 film documentary, Fear and Learning
at Hoover Elementary, it will resist rejection so long as its source
metaphor, curriculum as path, goes
uncontested in the public discourse on education.
Everyone in
To reiterate, curriculum
as path is not a natural or necessary metaphor. It is merely a conventional
way of talking that is the basis of our conceptualization of educational
content. It is quite healthy to suspend for the moment the pairing of the factory and path metaphors, which together mask and legitimize a number
of unjust institutional aspects of public schooling. The so-called good reasons
and appeals to human nature that have been marshaled over the years to justify
the efficiency standard may then begin to sound like brittle rationalizations.
We now turn to the final major constitutive metaphor
for public education that was located in
The mainstream
is one of the most frequent metaphors in educational discourse. This term appeared
scores of times during the Proposition 227 debate on bilingual education. Here
we offer just two examples:
39.
"Immigrant
students … try to learn enough English to join the mainstream" (
40.
"More
than 24,000 students were transferred out of bilingual program classes and into
mainstream classes in 1994–95."
(
It turns out that this metaphor guides our thinking
about how a child becomes a typical American adolescent. As the final metaphor
that structures public discourse on public education in the
Unlike the curriculum
as path metaphor, for which the primary image is a walking path of a single
trekker, the river metaphor
invokes a stream whose current transports its bobbing voyagers/students. However,
the river carries them along in different ways. On the one hand, the mainstream
conjures a swift and deep channel where the current is strong, and the
direction narrowly defined. Anyone who is carried along in the river's mainstream
will be carried further and more quickly along. In contrast, the same river
runs slowly on its shallow periphery. Its shores are fraught with sandbars and
stagnant pools. The child's progress drifting along in these shallows is slower
and less secure. As articulated in the Los
Angeles Times, deadwood and other debris can snag the students floating
slowly along the margins of the river:
41.
"We'll
continue to be in the backwaters of
public education, and, in an information-driven society, we simply can't afford
to let that happen." (
Contrary to the path
metaphor, individual volition is not part of the semantic domain of the river metaphor. Everyone is carried
along in the current. The educational mainstream
thus does not invoke notions of perseverance, talent, or ambition, as does the curriculum as path metaphor. Instead,
individuals arrive at different destinations depending on their position in the
river's flow. Narrow and deep channels carry children faster and further along
than children caught on the slow-moving shallows of the river.
The semantics of river
has a second important element. A single river empties a whole region. Whether
comprising a local region the size of a school district, or a whole nation,
each river blends the waters of smaller distinct streams into a single common
waterway. Rivers like the
Assimilating
to the Mainstream. The river metaphor
informs non-curricular educational process, namely student socialization. It
also expresses the means by which a school inculcates hegemonic views. In the
semantics of river, students are
simply carried along. If the river is swift and narrow, children move quickly
and eventually blend completely with the mainstream. If slow, their absorption is incomplete. This is their assimilation
into
The public school creates members of
42.
Those
changes were a response, [the principal] said, to parent concerns…to speed the
transfer of bilingual program students into the educational mainstream. (
In the public discourse surrounding Proposition
43.
two
school districts are considering resolutions that condemn a state-mandated
language program designed to mainstream
non-English-speaking students (
44.
"Fluency
in English is a 'civil rights matter,' said …a language expert. 'We do not have any evidence that primary language
instruction is leading to learning English so these children can join the mainstream'." (
By guaranteeing the English-language dependence of
these students, their so-called foreign nature will assuredly be lost as they
are channeled into the common American culture, and toward consensus with
hegemonic viewpoints. For educators who espoused a pro-bilingual education position,
mainstreaming referred less obviously to assimilation. In the Los Angeles Times database, bilingual
education advocates emphasized a wider range of academic objectives and more
access to college preparation courses. These resources for social advancement,
as always, are available only in mainstream classes.
In the final analysis, however, no American public
school educator will deny that mainstreaming,
the social indoctrination of immigrant, linguistic minority and other
marginalized children, is part of the mission of the public schools. It is less
likely that the use of the term mainstream,
much less the river metaphor, is
part of educators' conscious awareness. Nevertheless, river and the other two major constitutive metaphors sustain
the status quo conceptualization of public schools.
SHAPING
ELECTORAL AND POLICY DECISIONS. How do these metaphors work to effect educational policy?
Consider the 1998 vote of the
Within the perceptual frame of reference established by
the three major conceptual metaphors that guide
Pedagogies that are not framed in terms of the student as machine and school as factory metaphors will be
devalued when appraised in terms of efficiency. For example,
Likewise,
contrary to the factory's
associated mechanistic views of learning, bilingual education upsets the
assumption that no important learning occurs outside of the school as factory walls. In particular,
bilingual education affirms the home language and life experiences that Latinos
and other non-English speaking children bring to the schoolhouse door.
Bilingual education also fails to conform to the efficiency metric of school as factory, by maintaining dual
tracks (languages) with equal capacity to convey educational content. Likewise,
dual paths are maintained when both
bilingual and English-only curricula are permitted. How can we tell who really
wins the educational footrace when more than one path can be taken? And
contrary to the logic of the river
metaphor, bilingual education instructs these children in so-called
non-mainstream languages and encourages non-mainstream worldviews. By the logic
of this trio of conventional metaphors, bilingual education necessarily is
marginal. It not central to public education, and so is easy target for an
overwhelmingly monolingual English-speaking electorate to eliminate in order to
restore the coherence and consistency of the American public school status quo.
Instead of bilingual education, these three dominant metaphors demanded, in the
wording of Proposition 227, "that all children in
This repressive constellation of metaphors for public
education – factory, PATH, and river
– is overdue for public
reconsideration and replacement. However, two factors make them particularly
resistant to change. One is social inertia. They also echo other
In the next section, we also recommend a pair of
"guerrilla metaphors" to compete in public discourse with the
metaphors in current use. By guerrilla metaphors, I mean those that are likely
to be broadly acceptable to the American public, but still can open up an
up-to-date, even radical, view of American public education. The task is
daunting, since the status quo rejects all views of education that are
inconsistent with these conventional metaphors. However, the status quo is
failing the majority of the nation's children. For this reason, I offer two
guerrilla metaphors with the hope of advancing a new view of public education
in the minds of the voting public.
GUERRILLA
METAPHORS. Toward
the end of fine analysis of the origins, circumstances, and state of Chicano
public education,
Learning
as Building. The
first guerrilla metaphor, knowledge as
construct, has been elaborated among American educational theorists, professionals
and researchers since at least
Within the edification metaphor, the school is no
longer a factory, but rather becomes an active, building construction site. The
student is no longer a chip of raw material to be drilled, threaded and stamped
into shape along the educational assembly line, to be judged as a standard
issue production unit, to be marked down as defective if not standard issue, or
to be warehoused when overstocked. The teacher no longer is an intellectual
drone or industrial worker. Instead, they are both active builders of
knowledge.
In addition, from the frame of reference of the
edification metaphor, the student does not arrive at school bereft of
knowledge. She arrives at school already dwelling in her home abode of
knowledge. Among the kinds of knowledge she walks into the schoolhouse with,
her language is most conspicuous. Thus, the student comes to school to further build
on her knowledge foundation, to become a better builder of her own knowledge
residence. Further, the home communities, cultures, and languages of the
students are the communal or multi-family houses of knowledge. In the process
of building greater knowledge, master builders will not tear down a child's
home knowledge, or force a child to evacuate the only home she has ever known.
Rather, master builders will guide the student to build upon her home
knowledge.
In lieu of using efficiency as the gauge of industrial
success for evaluating schools, as is the case of the school as factory metaphor, standards of construction and
architecture will predominate such as order, arrangement, symmetry, beauty, and
convenience (Ching, 1995). The distinctiveness of each
student will be reflected in the edification, much like freestanding
single-family homes across
With this guerrilla metaphor, the
institution of public education become more clearly responsible for the kinds
and quality of building materials that are provided to students to build their
homes of knowledge. Some school districts already offer their children the
highest quality materials and engage highly skilled educational architects and
master builders to guide their students' own construction of mansions. These
children build veritable palaces of knowledge in which they will prosper all
their lives. Other school districts can provide the children of many working
class, non-white, and language-minority communities next to nothing in terms of
educational materials, and employ only inexperienced and under-trained
teachers. At such sites, these students will build as children always do, but
can only construct hovels with the means provided. It is perhaps for these reasons
that many children reject impoverished school sites, for often more destructive
places for knowledge construction in the streets beyond the schoolhouse walls.
The house as
abode metaphor provides ample semantic structure for instructional
content in terms of foundations, rooms, windows, floors, keystones, and other
architectural design elements. The construction site orientation also
de-emphasizes the head-to-head competition incumbent in the American education as footrace, while it retains
the possibility of expression of different individual development. Finally, the
student as knowledge builder,
Education
as Cultivation. The second guerrilla metaphor is
agricultural. The object of education in this metaphor includes the cultivation
of language arts, scientific methods, rational inquiry, and creative thinking.
Presently the term cultivation is
most often used to refer to elitist education, not the education of the masses,
which are typically provided only the basics. Nonetheless, modern educational
research reveals that all skills, from the rudiments to the most elaborate, are
developed by way of the same processes, and the most coveted require years to
cultivate. If we consider that the child's mind contains the seeds of learning,
like acorns, the child's mind must be cultivated over its lifetime to bear its
full potential harvest. From within this metaphor, the teacher becomes a sower and tiller. The teacher's role is critical, but just
as important, the school's soil must be fertile, and school's climate temperate
for learning, for the seeds of learning embedded in the mind and hands of each
child to spout and yield their bounty. The best seed falling on barren soil
will perish. Hence, school ecology is foregrounded
with this metaphor.
Within this view, the classroom and school site become
an orchard or vineyard to nurture, with a farmer's dedication supported by all
the science of a modern horticulturist. Student
as tree, classroom as orchard, education as cultivation – this constellation eliminates the
tendency to view learning as a set of mechanical skills to be drilled or facts
to be committed to memory. Life-skill cultivation and lifelong creativity are
its hallmarks.
Learning as cultivating can summon the presupposition
of an orchard of erudition. In each human child are planted the many seeds that
grow in us to make us social creatures (namely different languages and types of
learning). A child's mind, then, is not a vacant vessel, or a nickel's worth of
raw material to be hammered into an industrial product. It is an orchard in
which sown seeds of knowledge can germinate and flourish richly over time.
In the relatively bankrupt semantics of the current curriculum as path metaphor, only one entailment
is foregrounded, namely personal volition. As shown,
this entailment is grossly unfair to children. On the other hand, the
cultivation metaphor foregrounds a child's developmental processes. It evokes
the personal potential of the student. In a productive vineyard, different
vines will produce distinct varieties. In the educational context, each child
will be able to express his or her unique learning potential, and to produce
abundantly with careful tending. In the place of the mechanical efficiency standard
of the factory, the axiom of this agricultural metaphor is inspired stewardship
to nurture the inborn potential of the human seed. In place of the footrace,
which produces many losers for every winner, the guiding principal of the
tiller is to realize the productivity of the whole orchard. The successful
cultivator patiently tends vines so they can bring forth their yearly yield of
fruit. This metaphor does not discount individual volition, nor is it incompatible
with the goal of a greater meritocracy.
Dahany (1986)
divided metaphors drawn from educational literature on teacher/student
relations into mutually human ones and human to nonhuman ones. Dahany deemed the former were bad, and view the latter critically.
Among the latter was a gardening metaphor, which Dahany
correctly noted entails student passivity. This entailment must be kept in mind
when using this guerrilla metaphor.
It emphasizes elevating human sensibilities and
creativity far better than conventional mechanistic metaphors for education.
SHARED
ADVANTAGES. In high contrast, to its favor, edification is semantically congruent
with the house metaphor. Likewise cultivation is consonant with nation as body. Since the
Neither the edify
or cultivate metaphors employ the
conventional river metaphor. Wiley
has noted that using the term mainstream
in educational contexts reinforces and obscures potent power relations (Wiley,
1996, 1998). To become part of the educational mainstream is to become part of
the dominant Anglo-American cultural matrix. On the other hand, to remain on
the margins of that mainstream is to remain subordinate to more powerful
groups. In contrast, with the guerrilla metaphors, children are either
privileged to attend schools rich enough to edify their home knowledge and
cultivate their talents, or they are relegated to schools that neither edify
nor cultivate. Such a failed public school builds (in edification terms) or
grows (in cultivation terms) powerless and disadvantaged children, through no
fault of the child.
The current constellation of path and river
metaphors is particularly injurious to non-English speaking students and
non-standard English speaking students. Language use that is not standard is
deemed to be a barrier along the
curricular path of students. The singular path is associated with a single
dialect and monolingualism. Consequently,
bilingualism is also a barrier. In the logic of current metaphors, if this
obstacle is not bridged or otherwise
overcome, then bilingualism becomes a prison
for students. This metaphor-generated viewpoint culminates with the claim that
if these children are not mainstreamed, in other words, if they do not become
monolingual, they will become educationally handicapped.
None of these inaccurate associations automatically follow when using the
edification or cultivation metaphors for education. See Santa Ana (2002,
chapter 6) for a full analysis of guiding metaphors for languages other than English,
the English language, and their relationship to the nation in the public
discourse on U.S. public education that are mentioned in this section of the
article.
In bold relief, the edification metaphor for education
resonates with the commonly used term, home
language. The metaphor can be used in a manner that is consistent with the
latest research on linguistic acquisition and cognitive development, to state
in effect that eliminating a home language demolishes the linguistic home of a
child's knowledge. The private residence of erudition of the unmistakably
educated person, over the objection of monolingual nativists,
is not English-dependence, but multilingualism. Further, authentic bilingual
education provides the materials and master builders' guidance for children to
develop multiple linguistic competencies to construct new homes of knowledge.
To use the frame of reference of the other guerrilla
metaphor, cultivation, to
eliminate a child's home language is to rip out the six or seven year old
sapling in order to plant a stringy seedling. Current psycholinguistic research
indicates that each child has abundant linguistic resources for a whole orchard
of languages. Why do Americans settle for one variety (Standard English), when
their children can become accomplished speakers of many languages and varieties
of English? From within this metaphor, the rampant growth of language during
the child's whole public school period can be articulated with the vocabulary
of richness and life-long yield, rather that the conventional view of obstacle, prison and handicap.
SUMMARY. Three conceptual
metaphors currently constitute
The second constitutive metaphor, curriculum as path, is congruent with
the school as factory metaphor.
The path invokes personal
responsibility on the part of children for their schooling, and falsely holds
that the conditions of the academic footrace are the same for each child. This
false entailment backgrounds unequal social and structural factors that favor
some groups at the expense of other groups. Socioeconomic disparities and continuing
institutional racism are passed over in these mythical allegories. The American
ethic of fair head-to-head competition, which most citizens avow, is mocked by
the entailment.
The third constitutive metaphor, again found with
abundance in public discourse, characterizes the other process of public
schools. The socialization process as river
is part of growing up in a school setting; it is automatic as aging a year in
365 days. It is not a matter of will or personal initiative. Mainstreamed
children naturally mature to become members of the majority society. On the
other hand, Latino students (as well as other immigrant, working class and racialized children) are accorded their well-established
roles on the margins of
With these three conceptual
metaphors, the contemporary discourse on
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