EDUCATION, ZEN AND THE ART OF CORRESPONDENCE.

COMMUNICATION; LANGUAGE & languages; VOCABULARY; EDUCATION; INTENTION; THOUGHT & thinking

This article focuses on the art of correspondence. Some degree of mismatch between utterance and reality is inevitable. One of Swift's deft imaginings in Gulliver's Travels shows how unmanageable communication would become if it attempted too close a correspondence with the things people want to talk about. No linguistic contour should ever be expected to map the landscape of fact exactly. Therefore, one of the key responsibilities of education is to police the correspondence between linguistic contour and landscape of fact and to tell, when things get out of synch between feelings, intentions, the world in which they're set, and the words people use to bridge the space between them.