Metaphors, self and reeducation

Abstract

This study examines how graduates of a specific educational institution (“The Boarding School for the Gifted Disadvantaged” in Israel) integrate their school experiences into their life story. The in-depth interviews with the boarding school graduates demonstrate special use of the gift metaphor to describe their selfhood and their phenomenological attitude toward the boarding school. Against this backdrop, the article inductively extracts five variations of a gift (and of the self-concept of the boarding school graduates). The use of the various metaphors includes a comprehensive toolkit (self-understandings, accounts, different orders of discourse, sites for maintaining the self) that in turn reflects a different biographical attitude of the graduate toward the educational institution in which he studied as a youth. This study emphasizes that understanding of the manner in which individuals integrate educational and school experiences in their life story can teach us about schools as formation sites of the self and about the long-term influences of education.

Keywords:

• self
• boarding schools
• reeducation
• metaphors
• gift
• reflexivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term Mizrahim was a cultural invention of society in the first years of the establishment of the State. As Shohat (1999) describes it, we are speaking about an “umbrella term” that placed within it all of the Jews from Arab countries (including, for instance, Moroccan Jews who did not come from the Orient).

2. The use of the word “sequence” was inductively extracted from this study. Together with this, I would like to be cautious with this word. I don’t mean to suggest that one metaphor necessarily causatively leads to another. The rationale for creating sequence is twofold. Firstly, this sequence analytically enables me to suggest that the types of gifts (and the types of self as gifts) should be discussed. These gifts range from “romantic” gifts (which include a subjective experience of symmetry and gratitude) to gifts that include “dark sides” (and which describe an emotional burden and constant indebtedness). Secondly, the interviewees that experience the “negative” end (a gift as a bribe) describe how over the course of their life they used romantic metaphors and only when they got older and developed a critical awareness did they begin to use negative gift metaphors. In order to examine this sequence, I even contacted this group of interviewees, about a year after the interviews, and presented the sequence to them. Most of them described how this sequence could be logically characteristic of how they related to the boarding school over the years.

3. The sentence, “it’s like they injected us with different genes”, like the expression “white sheep”, are expressions that, as one of the anonymous readers of this article suggested, go way beyond the metaphor of a gift. These expressions – like the discussion in “The Boarding School for the Gifted Disadvantaged” – are deserving of in-depth reference in terms of ethnicity, race, and racism. This reference appears in Shoshana (2012).

4. Six informants described highly critical accounts toward the boarding school and offered critical gift metaphors like “bribe”. It is important to point out that all of these informants are social and educational activists (an alternative school principal in a low socio-economic neighborhood, a social activist in a feminist organization, a documentary movie director and a lecturer on art and activism). In addition, each one of these informants spoke explicitly about the Orientalist discourse by way of the materials of Said (1978) and of Shohat (1999), who applied Saidian thought to specific cultural contexts in Israel.