How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 230

The metaphors indicated here by us in capital letters are likely to be
taken as literal by most. That is, listeners to the speech will not
consciously engage with assessing the degree of similarity and
dissimilarity and its significance.
However, the message of central government and parents acting
rather as machines, accelerating speed, delivering what is intended,
driving, is evident once pointed out. It is schools and teachers who
are to be driven and accelerated. The machine metaphor establishes
education as a thing, not as people. While the metaphors may be
dead in the sense of not registering as metaphors, they are very much
alive in reflecting a worldview of education, a cultural and historical
position. Dead metaphors have the capacity to shape thinking and
values as much as those that are live.
15.10 How metaphors influence
Researchers wanting to understand how metaphors shape the way
people think about things, have found that different metaphors don't
just make people think of different solutions, but of which solution is
best ("Mind the power of metaphors: study" - Times LIVE | 30
January, 2013 11:44)
The research, published in PloS One, follows another study in which
researchers had people come up with solutions to crime, where in
one metaphor it was compared to a virus and another to a beast.
In that study what they found was that when crime was described as
a beast people tended to argue for catching criminals and subjecting
them to harsher punishments.
When crime was described as a virus, people suggested tackling root
causes such as poverty, or educational reforms.
The new study was thus begun to see how metaphors influenced
which solutions people tended to pick.
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