Raising Children and Training Horses: Are They The Same?

I recently attended a meeting of independent elementary school headmasters in out west. One evening, we were bused to a ranch for a demonstration by a horse whisperer, an old cowboy who explained the “humane” methods he used to break horses. The goal is to create a trusting relationship with the horse so that you can saddle and ride him and he will never turn on you or kick you when you fall. He declared that this is also the right way to teach children: just as he was doing with the frightened, bucking steed, we should also give children choices, provide boundaries, and, above all, create trust so that they will submit to you.
Fifty-nine headmasters nodded their heads in agreement and muttered things like “so true, so true.” I feared that my colleagues were not taking the demonstration as a simile, understanding that training horses and teaching children are two separate paradigms with some things—but not every thing—in common. I saw them appreciating the event as a full metaphor, that is, as an absolute comparison. We should be cautious of educational metaphors, for metaphors can be powerful. The really apt ones break our habits and neat categories of thought.
I realized that this horse-whisperer metaphor is how most “good” schools tend to deal with their students. Having choices implies freedom, yet despite the soothing words of the cowboy, the horse did not have a real choice, but a false one between isolation or surrender. Coercion is still coercion no matter how nice the coercer. Is this what headmasters thought they were doing as good, enlightened school leaders? Are they just the good cops with the same goals as the bad cops, namely conformity and cooperation, obedience and submission? Whatever happened to education as a mode of liberation, true to the etymology of the word—to be lead out, into the light?
On the bus ride home, as the others gushed, I asked if they saw danger in making such a complete identification between training a horse and teaching a child. Beware the metaphors you choose, I said, for they will dictate how you operate. If you must find a metaphor for education in the culture of a ranch, wouldn’t it be more interesting to ruminate on the rancher-writer Gretel Ehrlich’s reverential thoughts on work animals. I happened to have one of her books in my backpack and began to read: “Living with animals makes us redefine our ideas about intelligence. Horses are as mischievous as they are dependable. Stupid enough to let us use them, they are cunning enough to catch us off guard. We pay for their loyalty: they can be willful, hard to catch, dangerous to shoe, and buck on frosty mornings. In turn, they’ll work themselves into a lather cutting cows, not for the praise they’ll get but for the simple glory of out dodging a calf or catching up with an errant steer.” Now, isn’t that, I concluded, a less reductive, more complex and respectful picture of horses, and maybe children too?
The next morning, the president of the headmasters’ organization, in her opening remarks, reflected on the previous evening, stating that she was training a new puppy at home, which was really the same process, she now realized, as raising her children. I groaned, and later that afternoon, decided to resign my membership with the organization.
I left the conference early and roamed around the state for a while, thinking about how the crisis in school leadership is really about locating critical thinkers who are willing to eschew more lucrative careers in favor of challenging our society’s past solutions to educational problems. As I drove, I glimpsed a family of moose, grazing and nuzzling, and I just watched them in the early evening until they moved on to higher ground.