The Library Metaphor
Friday, September 01, 2006 10:23 AM
Certain metaphors dominate our society and our way of
looking at the world. Lakoff has pointed out that seeing thinking as giving
birth or seeing competition as war cause us to use language and then to
actually believe that certain ways of seeing the world are the right way to see
them. Competition really is war. We need to “kill” our opponent in
the match. Sometimes these metaphors are helpful. Seeing time as money may help
us “budget” our time better. But sometimes they are disastrous.
One such disastrous metaphor has dominated thinking
about learning for a very long time. We need to get over it if we ever wish to
see schooling become in any way relevant in the “knowledge
society.” I am talking about the metaphor of knowledge as akin to
something to be found in a library.
Libraries have been around for a long time. For
generations, knowledge was contained in libraries, or so it seemed. But, in
fact, this was never true. It didn’t matter much, until recently.
Concomitant with the idea that knowledge is contained
in libraries is the idea that knowledge is found through search. In the old
days, when people actually went to libraries, there were card catalogues, which
were created with arcane notions such as the Dewey Decimal System that helped
searchers find books that had been properly catalogued. But we don’t need
that stuff anymore, because we have Google. Search has gotten easier, but real
knowledge hasn’t changed.
The problem is that both the library metaphor, and the
search metaphor have misled us in serious ways. The consequences of that will
take a moment to explain.
When everyone agreed that libraries contained all that
mankind knew, educational systems evolved in such a way that mastery of what
other people had written passed for education and hence erudition. Thus we have
the Great Books and the original conception of universities as places to read
what great thinkers had written. The concept of testing to see if one had
learned what these greats had written follows from this of course. Given that
information retained from books can be measured, as can the sheer number of
books read, school became a kind of competition to see who had retained the
most. The winners go to Harvard.
Behind all this is the idea of the mind as a kind of
library. Libraries are where knowledge is stored, so the mind must be a
particular kind of library and education must be about filling the library.
In reality the mind is no kind of library at all. We
lose “books” we have filed away, we mush together similar
“books,” and, worst of all, we really don’t consider it our
job at all to know what we know. The job of the mind is to deal with what is
going on at the moment. The mind is goal-driven not knowledge driven. Knowledge
is useful to the extent that it helps us accomplish goals. In fact, any child
knows this. But the school system does not. So when it finds a body of
knowledge it likes, (like algebra) it requires that those books get stuffed in
the library and checked out from time to time. The students ask: Why do I need
this? When will I use it? What goal will it help me accomplish? Since the
actual answer to those questions are you don’t, never, and none, the
system refuses to answer the question and instead says things it can in no way
prove like it will train your mind. We are stuck in a bad metaphor. One that
thinks knowing the works of Dickens is what knowledge is, when in actuality
knowing what to do in a given situation is what knowledge is. Procedures
matter. The more processes you know (that is the more you can execute) the more
you can do.
School is not about doing, despite scholars from Plato
to Dewey saying it should be, because of the library metaphor. Doing is hard.
It is hard to do and it is hard to teach. But if knowledge is about storage
then school becomes easier to manage. If the best students are those who store
and search well, then we can figure out who goes to Harvard. But if knowledge
is the service of the achievement of daily human goals, then knowledge might be
something hard to explicitly state and to measure.
We have got to get rid of the library metaphor or
school will always be the same: an experience to be endured rather than
relished.
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