IV. Adjacent Territory Essay 30
Every Metaphor Is a Borrowed Map
How to use another thing's map without getting lost in it
A teacher is a gardener. Every beginner teacher is told this, and every teacher who has been in a classroom for a year has discovered the places where it stops being true. A gardener can walk past a bed and see that a plant is struggling. A gardener can decide what to do about it, and there are plants that want dividing and plants that want staking and plants that want nothing at all. A teacher cannot walk into a classroom and fix the student at the back. A teacher cannot stake a student. And the number of students in a class is not something a gardener chooses, and the growing season is not something a teacher can arrange.
And yet the metaphor is not stupid. It is the reason teachers tend a class rather than administer it. It is a way of thinking, and it works, and it has a point at which it stops working.
A metaphor is a map borrowed from another place, and it brings the map's distortions with it. That is what makes metaphors so useful and so treacherous, and the useful part and the treacherous part are the same part. The skill is not in using metaphors. It is in knowing where each one stops working, which means the skill is in testing the borrowed map against the territory.
Take the gardener metaphor seriously for a moment and see how far it carries you. A gardener tends things that grow. A teacher tends things that grow. A gardener's success is measured by what grows, not by how much effort was spent, and a gardener who is always digging has failed. That is true of teaching too, and it is a genuinely useful thing to know.
Now take it further. A gardener decides what to plant. A teacher decides what to teach. A gardener's plants are largely beyond repair once damaged. A teacher can repair a student who has been badly taught, and a gardener cannot re-grow a tree that has been cut down. A gardener's work is seasonal and a teacher has a timetable. A gardener's plants do not talk back, and this is where the thing gets interesting, because a plant that does not talk back is a plant with no opinions, and a class of thirty teenagers is the opposite of that.
So the metaphor works for the first two moves and fails on the third. And the failure is not a small technicality. A gardener never has to be persuaded that growth is good for the plant. A teacher has to persuade thirty people that a particular kind of growth is good for them, against their immediate preferences, which is the entire difficulty of the job, and it is a difficulty the gardener metaphor makes invisible.
What the borrowing does
When you say one thing is like another, you are taking a description that works for the second thing and applying it to the first. The description comes with its distortions baked in, because every description of anything is a map that leaves something out.
Calling a teacher a gardener borrows the gardener's map of teaching, and the gardener's map of teaching leaves out the students' opinions, the institutional constraints, the assessment, the fact that some of them do not want to grow at all in the direction you have in mind, and the ordinary Friday afternoon. You get a picture of teaching as a patient, attentive, seasonal craft, and that picture is good for some things and bad for others.
What if you took the other metaphor instead. A teacher is an architect. Architects design structures that have to stand up. Architects work from a plan. Architects are responsible for the building's integrity and are judged by it. That map is also good, and it fails in a different place. An architect can decide what to build. A teacher cannot decide what a student will become. And an architect's building does not argue back on Tuesday, and a teacher's class does, and a building that argues back is either a ruin or a public building, and it is not a house.
Now change the condition. What if you held both at once? A teacher as gardener and a teacher as architect, side by side, both partly right, both partly wrong, and a different failure in each. Now you have two maps of the same territory with different distortions, and a person using two maps can check one against the other, and the places where they disagree are exactly the places worth looking at. That is what two metaphors are for, and it is a better use of a metaphor than the one most people make of it.
"Metaphors are dangerous and we should use literal language instead." Literal language is not neutral. The sentence this pupil has not understood is a literal sentence and it hides as much as any metaphor does. The direct description of a lesson plan does not include the teacher's judgement about what a good lesson is, and that judgement is in there whether it is said in a metaphor or not. A metaphor is more honest about its own shape than a plain description, because you can see that it is a comparison.
The other misconception: "a good metaphor is one that is accurate." There is no such thing, in the sense that matters. A metaphor is never accurate. It is useful for some purposes and misleading for others, and the question is never whether it is right but what it is right about. "A garden" and "a machine" and "a conversation" can all be the right metaphor for a lesson, for different purposes, and holding all three is not confusion, it is the way to be precise.
How to test a metaphor
Ask: where does this break? Not whether it works. Where does it stop working? A metaphor that you cannot break is a metaphor you have stopped examining. The gardener one breaks the moment a student refuses to grow, and the moment you find out that a plant does not have a mother who died in March and cannot concentrate, and the moment you realise that the gardener gets to choose the soil and you do not.
Then ask: which parts of the territory does it light up, and which parts does it hide? A good metaphor is one that lights up the part you are working on. A bad one hides it. This is exactly the test you would apply to any other model, and it is worth noticing that metaphors are models, and that most people treat them as a different kind of thing because they are made of words rather than diagrams.
Metaphors with a direction
Some metaphors are not just maps, they are arguments, and they are worth catching when you see them because they are doing work rather than describing.
"A school is a factory" is not a neutral comparison. It says that the purpose of a school is to take raw material and turn it into a finished product, and that the people who do the turning are the technicians and the people who are turned are the material. You can disagree with that and you should, because a great deal of what is wrong with schools follows from accepting it quietly.
"A classroom is a democracy" is another one, and it points the other way, towards discussion and shared decision. It too is an argument. And "a child is a plant" and "a child is an empty vessel" and "a child is a seed" and "a child is a fire" all point in different directions, and all of them are used by people who think they are simply describing.
The point is not that these are bad. The point is that they have a direction, that the direction does real work, and that choosing between them is a decision about what a child is for, made in the vocabulary rather than in the argument.
Metaphors in a shared language
When a school talks about the timetable, certain things come into view: slots, clashes, gaps, the grid. When it talks about the timetable as a constraint, a different set comes into view: the thing that cannot be changed, the bottleneck, the fixed point. When it talks about the timetable as an arrangement, a third set. The shared metaphor is what makes the noticing possible, and it is also what makes other noticing unavailable.
Limits
This essay is careful not to make any strong claim about language and thought, because the strong claims in this area are not well supported and the weak claims are not worth making. What is being claimed here is narrow. A metaphor is a description applied outside the place it was made for, and descriptions carry distortions, and this one is no exception. That is a claim about how a comparison works, not a claim about how people think.
Second limit: the examples are all from education because the gardener and the architect are familiar ones. The pattern holds in technical work, where "the brain is a computer" and "the brain is not a computer" pull in opposite directions and both are used by people who think they are being precise. It also holds in craft, and in families, and in the language we use for money, illness, war, and time.
Third limit: some metaphors have been so thoroughly examined that their failure points are well known and the examination is done. The gardener one has been picked over for a long time, and much of what is good about it is the result of that. The essays here are picking over new ones, and a freshly coined metaphor is always a bit embarrassing, and the embarrassment is a sign that it has not been tested enough yet.
Stuck
You are stuck in a metaphor when you are defending it rather than using it. The tell is that the question is no longer what the case is but how it is like the other thing, and the answer to that is always yes. Nobody has ever said the teacher is not like a gardener, and that is not because it is so obviously true.
The way out is to change the subject. Stop talking about teachers and gardens and ask about the specific Tuesday. What actually happened, what did you do, what happened next, and what would you do differently. The metaphor will still be in your head, and it is worth keeping there, because it is what makes you look for the growing and the withering. But the argument has to be about the Tuesday, and the Tuesday does not have to be a plant.
Sources
- Metaphor as a way of understanding, and the gardener and architect figures for teaching, are usually associated with the work of the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on the nature of metaphor. The claims made here are much narrower than the claims in that work and no specific book, example, or wording is cited.
- No particular article, study, or quotation is reproduced anywhere in this essay.
- All examples are ordinary and hypothetical.