Organic versus Symbolic Pedagogy: Against the Commercialization of Knowledge

The most basic metaphor of knowledge consumption (the organic metaphor) suggests that knowledge is gained through a physical, carnal act of incorporation. In this essay we point to the disappearance of the organic metaphor of knowledge from modern Western pedagogy. We argue that the replacement of the organic metaphor with the symbolic metaphor of knowledge can be explained by a social realm in which the detachment of symbols from their concrete historical references has reached its peak in economics, cognition and pedagogy. In this context,
we criticize modern pedagogy for passively accepting a given social order
rather than choosing a critical educational discourse