Tag: Learning

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Of Houses and Cars

Learning requires us to use powerful metaphors.

With that in mind, check out the following paragraph which I’ve had in my syllabus for the past five years:

This course’s promises don’t mention specific grades. That’s important. The specific grades you receive at midterm and after finals are neither a reflection of your worth as a human being nor the ultimate purpose for the class. Think of your education like a house. Grades are like a house inspection. They simply tell you that the house meets basic building codes. You live in the house. You put the inspection in a drawer and eventually forget about it. As you assess your progress towards realizing the course’s promises, remember what matters.

There’s nothing wrong with the metaphor. It’s apt. When I’ve shared it with a colleague, they always nod their head in agreement.

But my students don’t really feel its truth. Few of them have built a house, much less been involved in a house inspection.

So here’s how that paragraph will read from now on.

This course’s promises don’t mention specific grades. That’s important. The specific grades you receive at midterm and after finals are neither a reflection of your worth as a human being nor the ultimate purpose for the class. Think of your education like your ability to drive a car. Grades are like your driver’s license. They simply tell you that you can legally get behind the wheel of a car. You probably know people that you would never want to drive you anywhere even though they have their license. This is the person who gets all As and Bs and manages to not have learned anything. The grade is a necessary step in learning, but it’s not the same as being educated. As you assess your progress towards realizing the course’s promises, remember what matters.

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Interaction, Not Substitution

This discussion of the history of changes in our language, and in specific Christian uses of language, has brought us to a point where a redefinition of metaphor is in order. In place of the long-standing Aristotelian view of metaphor as substitution, as a process in which poetic words “stand in’ for literal ones, we could perhaps say that the metaphorical process is one of interaction. When we use a metaphor, we say that one thing is another. We take a word from its conventional context and apply it to a new situation.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

In the quotation above, Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher present a new way of understanding metaphor. Since this site’s title–Education is Discipleship–is a metaphor, it’s worth thinking about how those two words interact.

The current connotations of discipleship and education are spiritual and secular respectively. The interaction between the two stresses the similarities between the two enterprises, that both discipleship and education produce growth through the act of learning. For Christ’s followers, the language of education–of students and teachers, disciples and rabbis–was the easiest way to understand the Messiah’s work. The great commission contains the word that means “teach” and commands us to go create more students.

A great deal of money and research over the past three decades has been spent figuring out we learn best. All of this material should be grist for our discipleship mill. No, education will never fully encompass the work of discipleship, but noticing the interaction between the two is a way of both understanding what Christ has called us to do and discovering new ways of learning more about him and the world.