Bad Metaphor: Teaching as Medicine

Written By Nathan Smalley
““We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ”
— Kurt Vonnegut, from Mother Night

Teachers are not doctors. Yet, for some needless reason, educational lingo is laden with tropes of medicine. Perhaps this comes from policymakers’ misguided attempts to “professionalize teaching” (which means what exactly?), or to “standardize practices” (read: exert control, not cultivate excellence). Or perhaps it comes from academics who impose a need to make the work more discussable and measurable. Regardless of the intent, the metaphors fail—because education is nothing like medicine.

Education professor James H. Nehring (2013) described the problem plainly:

“Doctors work mainly in the realm of the biological and chemical. Educators work mainly in the realm of behavior and attitudes… For example, unlike medicine, effective teaching cannot be discerned strictly on the basis of scientific studies. The more we insist that it can—and we insist a great deal—the more we deny teachers the crucial element of judgment.”

Schools talk of “diagnosing student needs,” developing “intervention plans” (read: treatment plans), and deploying “best practices” without understanding that these turns of phrase—while perhaps convenient—are also potentially trapping. This lingo, which rings in the ears with scientific verisimilitude, pretends that teaching is simpler than it is. Framing the sacred work through the ill-fitting lens of medicine—particularly the Western, treatment-focused view—makes living beings into collections of deficits to be corrected. And it robs teachers of the agency they must embody to do their work with care and wisdom.

Zen teacher Joko Beck cautioned against the subtle violence we do when we treat human suffering—or growth—as something to be “fixed.” She often described practice not as self-improvement, but as radical acceptance: not solving the person in front of us, but being fully with them. Teaching, like practice, isn’t about intervention. It’s about intimacy. It requires showing up, not with a toolkit of treatments, but with presence, patience, and deep listening. The most powerful teachers aren’t the ones who diagnose; they’re the ones who encounter.

Barry Magid, in his work on the “problem-solution” paradigm, reminds us that the obsession with solving what we perceive to be wrong—whether in ourselves or in others—often blinds us to what’s already whole. Education conceived through the lens of diagnosis and cure presumes the student is broken. But the great teacher sees the learner not as a set of symptoms but as an expression of conditions—dynamic, changing, and irreducibly human. Teaching, then, is not a matter of fixing but of fostering. Not prescribing, but participating.

Teachers do not enjoy the point-in-time treatment of an observable confluence of limited variables producing something as tidy as a disease. (Yes, I’m being more than a little facetious here.) Instead, each individual student they encounter is a wild, conscious constellation of embodied thoughts, emotions, preferences, patterns, and capacities in perpetual motion. Each student continually shapes and reshapes herself into new forms as the moment demands. Great teachers, through an alchemy of skillful means, knowledge, and mindfulness, create the causes and conditions that allow the humans in their care to explore, to fail, to thrive—to become more fully human. Teaching is as complex an undertaking as there is on the planet.

So if we need metaphors—and perhaps we do—let them come from richer soil.

Teaching is more like art than medicine. It is a live performance. A jazz improvisation with no set list and no promise of applause. Each day, a teacher steps into the unknown with tools, instincts, and a practiced ear—ready to meet the moment, to shape it, to be shaped by it. It requires planning, and skill, and attunement. And like all true artists, the teacher doesn’t just follow a method; they make meaning.

Let’s not pretend it’s something so simple as medicine.

REFLECTION

  • Where have you encountered metaphors and language of treatment in your practice?

  • What in your daily language perpetuates medical thinking in your practice?

REFERENCES

Nathan Smalley
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