Research On The Metaphor Of Educational Administration

Humanities Knowledge is humanized knowledge, and metaphor is an important method of understanding of humanities. Since 1970's, metaphor has been a hot topic among scholars and researchers around the world. As one important character of the postmodernism, it also has great value in education field. Metaphor is not only a type of language form, but also a method of thinking, and has great practical significance in education. In education management, metaphor is helpful in understanding, conversations, explanation, and is especially practically useful in communications between teachers and students, and organizational transformations at schools. This paper applied methods of literature analysis, observation, etc to analyze and classify large amount of education metaphor, and, based on which influence and limits of metaphor in education are also analyzed. Main body of this paper is divided into three parts:Part 1: summary of metaphorInitially metaphor was observed by researchers as a form of language. With historic changes, and multiplication and overlapping trends in the theoretical world, metaphor has earned its esteem in various studies such as philosophy, rhetoric, etc. This paper is started from the angle of education administrators to explore metaphor, tracks back to its origin and set forth the definition of metaphor.Part 2: the analysis of metaphor in education administration.Through collecting massive literature materials, the author observed that metaphor takes various forms in education administration. It is obvious that metaphor has great influence on education administration to different extent respectively in text, language and abstract ideas. In this part, the author will classify the collected metaphor samples and, through analysis of typical metaphor samples, elaborate how they reflect the problems in education administration field. As for paper structure, this part does not follow the conventional rules in research of education administration. Instead, based on realistic needs, it analyzes the major problems in education administration field, mainly pinpointing metaphor in education organization, education leadership, faculty management, and teaching management. This part is one of the important points in the research. Large amount of metaphor materials are sourced from literatures, interviews and conversation abstracts, and observation on long term basis. Part 3: the influence and enlightenment of metaphor in education administrationFounded on classification and analysis in former parts, it is obvious metaphor is a "dual blade sword"—with both active influence and passive influence on education administration. Clear understanding of its "dual characters" is necessary for education administrators to master and apply metaphor beneficially. Metaphor also inevitably has its limitations. The author will hold objective attitude towards the limits of metaphor, and combine former parts together providing education administrators with suggestion. This part is the final foothold of the research and also an important point of this paper.