Metaphors, self and reeducation

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.