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Metaphors and their implications for research and practice in adult and community education
Cheryl Hunt, Division of Adult Continuing Education, University of Sheffield
Introduction
To use a metaphor is to apply a name or descriptive term to something to which it is not literally applicable; the purpose is to provide a new way of seeing something that has become so familiar it is often not seen. Additionally, as Fletcher notes[1], the metaphors we use to represent the world to ourselves can act as bridges between our thoughts and our actions. Later, I shall describe the origins of two metaphors for society which help me to make sense of what is going on ‘out there’ and to make choices about the way I work. I invite you to consider what relevance they may have for your own teaching and research.
First, though, let me introduce you to some turtles, thought patterns and shadowed places. Each also has something to tell us about the familiar, but largely unseen, world in which we live and work.
Turtles
There is an apocryphal story about a meeting between the psychologist, William James, and an old lady who was convinced that the Earth rested on the back of a huge turtle. Politely, James asked what held up the turtle. The lady replied that the first turtle stood on the back of a second. Undaunted, James enquired what held up the second turtle. The withering response was, ‘Why, surely you know Professor, it’s turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down’.
Don’t laugh too soon! The turtle theory may seem bizarre – but it was undoubtedly arrived at using the same kinds of thought processes as those which have enabled most of us to create a more consensual view of ‘the way the world is’. Wilson[2] provides a simple analysis of these processes. The human mind, he says, behaves as if it were divided into two parts: the Thinker and the Prover. The Thinker is free to fantasize and can create thoughts about almost anything it chooses. The Prover has only one function: to prove what the Thinker thinks.
For the Thinker it is as easy to picture the Earth balanced on the backs of an infinite number of turtles as to visualize it orbiting the Sun. However, the Prover in my mind, and probably yours, is happier to substantiate the latter view for which there seems to be considerably more objective evidence. Secure in our rational thinking, we can smile at the old lady’s turtles. We can also brand her as eccentric, dismiss any ‘evidence’ she may produce to support her theory – and leave unquestioned our own picture of the ‘real’ world.
I am not suggesting that the next space-probe might actually spot the turtles. Nevertheless, it is only a few hundred years since ‘common knowledge’, society’s collective mindset, decreed that the Earth was flat and dragons lived at the edges. Those who first intimated otherwise, and those who began to dispute other universal ‘givens’, like the movement of the Sun around the Earth, were branded as mad or as heretics – and risked derision or even death in propounding their views. So I am suggesting that, by constricting our thoughts and actions, mindsets have a strong bearing on what we regard as ‘reality’.
Mindsets
I referred just now to ‘common knowledge’ as the collective mindset of a society. Constituting the ‘givens’ from which further knowledge grows and expands, it represents the ideas we think with rather than those we think about. Such knowledge is generally held in trust by the society’s institutions, a term used here to denote all the organizational structures through which customs and practices are established and upheld, such as families, governments, educational academies, class structures and multinational corporations.
Detailing the importance of such institutions, Douglas[3] describes how they store and process information, often over many generations, and thereby determine the mores of the society in question and influence the thought patterns and behaviour of individuals within it. Even when individuals have some awareness of this influence, most find it extremely difficult to free themselves from it. Indeed, as Fennel et al point out, ‘Sociologists who spend their lives trying to demystify society find that its immense present reality distorts their vision constantly’[4].
For Douglas[5] the process of ‘demystifying’ society is problematic because institutions ‘create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked’. Thus, by storing and processing the information which bounds our society, institutions both have an impact on and act like the unconscious part of our own minds. An analogy might be with a sponge which is able to absorb, and therefore to exclude from awareness, information which is superfluous to our immediate circumstances or which might be distressing. This selective exclusion of unwanted information is what enables us, as individuals as well as whole societies, to create our own ‘reality’. Two examples may help here:
First, what has your ‘reality’ been over the past five minutes? Have you been focusing on what has been said? Were you also aware of other impressions? Had you got bored and ‘gone’ somewhere else? Is it not the case that where we focus our attention is all that is ‘real’ for us – our ‘reality’ – at any given time? Think about occasions when someone has spoken and startled you because you were, literally, ‘lost in thought’!
Second, as in random blot tests where the visual stimuli remain the same but the ‘pictures’ people create from them vary considerably, what we ‘see’ in everyday situations – and believe to be ‘reality’ – varies from person to person. Shown a glass in which the contents were at the halfway mark would you say it was half full – or half empty?
The difference is not merely semantic: your answer probably represents your whole outlook on life! Such responses often stem from mindsets that have less to do with the present than with thought patterns and expectations laid down in the past as a result of personal experiences. Such experiences are themselves shaped and coloured by an institutional framework of which, for the most part, we are only vaguely aware.
Metaphors
In the remainder of this paper I want to explore, through the use of metaphor, the ‘reality’ created by the knowledge held in, and processed by, the institutions of Western industrialized societies – and to consider some of the implications of an alternative ‘reality’.
I should warn you that these metaphors have become my turtles! My Prover has satisfied me they are valid ways of seeing the world. Yours may not. In either event, check your mindsets: they may seriously influence the reality you choose!
The two metaphors are of a giant machine and of Gaia. The first symbolizes for me the way in which Western industrialized societies presently operate; the second holds promise for the future.
The machine metaphor originates from Toffler’s[6] view that industrial societies in the West are approaching the end of a period of civilization characterized by thought and behaviour patterns associated with the Industrial Revolution. Founded on a Newtonian vision of a ‘clockwork universe’, such societies have themselves become machines and people no more than the cogs to drive and serve them. The success of these ‘Society Machines’ has been measured in terms of their economic and political power, and their education systems designed to perpetuate the efficient operation of the machinery.
The information stored and processed by the institutions in such societies has been affected by mindsets born of the artificial separation of the physical from the spiritual world which seems to have been the necessary precursor of the advancement of modern science. One feature of ‘scientific thought’ often reflected in the structure of industrial societies is the importance attributed to classificatory systems, leading to separation and hierarchical ordering (in education, for example, in terms of age bands and abilities; in industry, between ‘blue and white collar’ work; and, of course, by gender and race).
Influenced by such thinking, the people-cogs of ‘Society Machines’ frequently define themselves in terms of their position in the Machine. They say ‘I am a teacher’ or ‘I am a miner’ or ‘I am a housewife’ as if their whole ‘I’, their whole ‘being-ness’ were invested in their Machine function. It is one reason why redundancy, or even enforced changes in established work patterns, can be so devastating, and why women whose full-time career has been in caring for their family sometimes find it so difficult to cope when grown-up children leave home: suddenly it is not clear who ‘I’ am.
Western ‘Society Machines’ now show signs of instability: many ‘cogs’ no longer have a clearly defined function; others have tried to redefine their function and/or their traditional relationship with other Machine parts. The institutions that have sustained the Machine are beginning to crumble and some of the ‘givens’ hidden in their shadows are being exposed to question. In Kuhn’s[7] terms, we may be experiencing a ‘paradigm shift’, a period in which there are too many anomalies to be absorbed within the existing paradigm and a new one must emerge. The Gaia metaphor is increasingly being used to give substance to the emerging paradigm[8].
The concept of Gaia was developed by Lovelock[9] who proposed that the Earth is a living system. Other scientists dispute this, but the powerful imagery created by attaching the name of the ancient Earth goddess to a modern scientific theory now provides a means of articulating the need for a re-examination, from a global perspective, of societal value systems. Underpinning this need is a tacit acknowledgement of the organic nature and interconnectedness of socio-political, physical and spiritual processes.
This acknowledgement derives, in part, from the workings of quantum physics rather than Newtonian mechanics. The difference is particularly relevant in the present context since a central tenet of the new physics is that the researcher and ‘the researched’ are inseparable. So, also, must be the teacher and ‘the taught’, in the sense of both subject matter and students.
For me, using Gaia as a metaphor for society both highlights the nature of such relationships and draws attention to the need for an education system that enables individuals to search for their own meaning, to answer the question ‘Who am I?’, unfettered by artificially imposed institutional boundaries or expectations. The key to this system may lie in the development of practitioner research, particularly in the field of adult and community education. Significantly, such research can enhance both the personal growth and development of the researcher through the process of reflection, and the social awareness and understanding of the research ‘subjects’ through their conscious and active involvement in the investigative process.
At a time when the ‘status’ of practitioner research is not yet fully recognised in academic circles, that of adult and community education still not entirely clear within the universities, and government intervention in education increasingly reactionary, such a notion may seem incongruous. However, it is born of an image created by the juxtaposition of the two metaphors I have described. This image has ‘Society Machine’ ideologies represented by a vast wave in the ocean which has reached its peak and begun to disintegrate; Gaian thought patterns and processes are giving shape to the new wave which must follow.
I may be alone in this ocean on the back of my turtle – but the ‘reality’ encapsulated by the new wave looks attractive. Will you join me there?
[1] C Fletcher (1992) Principles for the perceptive and persistent. In Community Education Network, Vol.12, No.8, pp.3-5
[2] RA Wilson (19