WHAT’S BEHIND METAPHORS: A MEANING ANALYSIS

 

 By: Thamy 

Metaphors are language illustrations that express the meaning of something with analogies, establishing similarity among the terms. For being a very used linguistic tool, it is noticed a flaw in its true sense. Analyzing with other eyes, a powerful resource is shown, capable of manipulating the true meaning of some concepts in society, because it can reach several people and offer several interpretations.

For Timothy Leary (1999), science is all metaphor, because it is always used throughout studies to expose their results to society. Nevertheless, why many of those explanations hide behind metaphors? Why do they not show its true meaning and sense to the people that are interested in these studies? All the modern science uses the metaphor "human being as a machine" to explain and understand the organisms, and posteriorly, widespread it as a way of understanding the universe. Although when we use metaphors to understand the world, we risk confusing and consequently diverting the true focus.

Looking at the world and at the people as machines is just to focus on their forms and movements, and not on their thoughts and life’s goals. I do not want to highlight that there is a war between science and religion, but many scientific results marked and diverted the focus of religious people. Adam Smith, in his book “The wealth of nations" published in 1977, brings in a passage this sentence: “The science is the great antidote against the poison of enthusiasm and superstition” (page 650). For Smith, emotions and human enthusiasms unchain ignorance. Therefore, science appears to reduce these feelings, turning them less ignorant. Superstitions were linked to human faiths, capable of taking the man to the stranger's sea, while science was specialized in solving problems, departing from studies and logical proofs that through the current philosophical positivist was thrown, winning larger proportions of importance.

It’s impossible not to recognize all the scientific progress in the world nowadays, but what is behind the metaphor imposed by them - Why does science use a metaphor that would conspire to define the humanity and the universe thoroughly? Studying a little the processes of government development, the education area – conspire school – and the society – conspire social –  are not really explicit, but in a certain way, are behind the mentioned metaphors. Society has always needed norms, rules and laws to conduct itself, morally, from a larger power. In addition, more thoroughly analyzing it, we can observe that education was used to establish a connection between the government and people. The school extent, from the middle age, was used and it is still used, to transfer culture to individuals, and no matter how much it has gone through many philosophical changes, it did not stop imposing conduct. The simple action of lifting hands, having a line, asking permission to go to the restroom, remaining in silence while the teacher speaks, are unconsciously accepted to be conducted by larger powers, turning the school into an automated atmosphere. All of this take place to make us ready to be conducted by rules and laws. The great problem is that we, as part of society, many times did not  try to understand what certain terms want to say to us and what is hidden behind them.

Inés Dussel and Marcelo Caruso (2003), in one of their studies on the genealogy of teaching where they portray the history of education, bring in one of their essays the following citation: "Comparisons are not innocent or neutral: to evoke other meanings implicates the relationships and connections that cannot be evident for the people to highlight, and that we want that to be" (p. 93).

One of the largest applied metaphors in teaching is the "teacher-sun", created by Jan Amos Comenio, father of the modern didacticism. Comenio worried about establishing teaching to the great mass, because it is more reasonable for education the government group than the individual alone. And it revealed the need of a power to command the army, referring to teachers and students. Taking advantage of this concept that the teacher is the sun of teaching and that his duty is to illuminate students, it can hide several interpretations. Analyzing the true purpose of the method of Comenio, we identify that the teacher's centralization as sun was important so that normality would follow, through the established authority of the teacher. Therefore, the student would just leave the darkness of ignorance, starting from the moment that the sun entered in his life. Until today in education, we can still find methods that centralize the teacher and remove the students' focus, and through many terms this centralization remains. Going back to the metaphor created by science that we are a machine, you accept it to be in favor of the fact that our thoughts, feelings and existence do not count, just our structure, movements and the acceptance of commands. Again, the subject here is not the war between religion and science, but the metaphors that are imposed by them. Such metaphors treat school as a machinery, since it just produces citizens for a society full of laws and norms. It does not bring the possibility that from the first contact with teaching, the student can change and transform his environment. Going more thoroughly into those terms is very important, we should think about what is hidden behind each one, so we can see the true interest of who produces them.

FIGURE 1: Timothy Leary

FIGURE 2: Adam Smith

          

  REFERENCES

SMITH, Adam. Wealth of Nations. United Kingdom: Ed. University of Chicago Press, 1977. 1152 p.

DUSSEL, Inés; CARUSO, Marcelo. A invenção da sala de aula: uma genealogia das formas de ensinar. São Paulo: Ed. Moderna, 2003. 255p, il.

LEARY, Timothy. Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era. São Paulo: Beca Produções Culturais, 1999.