Reply to comment

I enjoyed our first class together, and am enjoying being "introduced" now to Peter's students on this forum. Though it's decidedly "off-topic," I want to record here what I thought was the most interesting part of our first conversation on Tuesday: naming our metaphors for education. I said that I hoped this class could be a potluck (w/ me as only one of the many preparers of our intellectual food), but it turned out that many of you had very different ideas of what education was (or has been for you):

education	teacher	yourself	other students
mirror	mirror	observer	??
crushing	blunt object	malleable object	??
playground	architect	new child	specialists
race	timekeeper	athlete	competitors
workout	gym manager	exerciser	vending machines
gift	Santa	child	other children
constant	race	car	gas stations

So much to say about what these (almost unconscious) images tell us about our assumptions of what education is and how it operates: are the other students our competitors, or the suppliers of what we need to flourish, or co-workers? Do we see our teachers as coaches who are trying to help us flourish, or as umpires who will tell us when we are out-of-bounds? Does each of us see ourself as a child, small, not knowing the game, while others have an adoit sense of how to play it? And (most importantly!) can we revise those images for more productive ones....?

I'd be curious to hear what other students' answers might be to this prompt: "Education is...." -- and what the implications of those answers might be, for the work we'll be doing here together.