On the Dark Side of Cultivation or Against the Gardening Metaphor for Teaching

• In Event: 25.086 - Sheraton Roundtable Session One - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 25.086-12 - The Challenge of Cultivation

Abstract

Perhaps no metaphor for teaching is more dominant than that of gardening. The metaphor’s long-standing prominence in western education could be explained by the fact that it articulates well the natural state of the child as a creature not yet fully developed and therefore entrusts the teacher with facilitating and protecting this expected growth. Also, and especially in modern times, it allows the teacher to identify with a caring approach to the student, one that is based on empathy, attention, and respect for the child’s inner nature instead of teaching for predetermined and static outcomes which is based on authority, external control and imposition on the student. Like a gentle seed or plant, the student is viewed as fragile and pliable and must therefore be delicately nurtured and protected from harm. Educational cultivation is not aimed at molding individuals directly but concentrates on affecting the learning environment - the metaphorical “soil” - so that the student will flourish.
However, I argue that despite its seeming harmlessness, the gardening metaphor has a darker side that rarely gets attention. As such, it is not simply open to various interpretations, but also includes a deep, irreducible, and disturbing aspect within both agriculture and within the tradition of western education tradition, namely, that of centralized control in the service of the civilization process. In this paper, I wish to show that liking teaching to gardening is both a symptom and an expression of the exclusion of a variety of human experiences, an exclusion that is considered so obvious that it is hardly ever reflected upon. In a similar manner to the ways agriculture and sedentism have excluded other ways of living, the gardening metaphor excludes, or even eliminates with almost no trace, alternative modes of uncontrolled, not “domesticated” or “wild” learning. To show this I will mainly rely on anthropologist and political scientist
James Scott’s recent book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Early States (2017), and apply it (metaphorically and not) to the question of educational cultivation. In addition, reading in Scott’s earlier work and in several other sources, I suggest that the forest as an indirectly cultivated environment that involves the human and non-human, culture and nature, and the planned and the spontaneous could serve as a better metaphorical trajectory for education than the long-standing metaphor of the garden.

Author

• Oded Zipory, University of Dayton