More on Teacher Strategy 303The Teacher person would never choose to describe elephants in terms
of gnats, but if he received a nasty bite from a gnat, he might become
emotionally convinced that this gnat really was the size of an elephant:
“You should have seen the creature that bit me. It had wings the size of a
small jetliner. One bite from that critter took a chunk out of me the size of
a silver dollar.” This sounds funny in real life, but I suggest that something
similar often occurs within the internal world of Teacher thought,
especially when this strategy is subconscious, as it is in those of us who are
not Teacher persons.A
Second, there is the issue of
specialization. If I spend twenty
years working on an assembly line
attaching three screws and two
bolts to a piece of L-shaped metal,
then my Teacher storage shed will
fill up with a whole complexity of
ideas and theories about screws,
bolts, and L-shaped fragments of
metal. As a result, automatic
Teacher thought is going to think
that theories which relate to screws,
bolts and bits of metal are very
general. By spending all of my time
within a limited area of expertise, I
have turned a gnat into an elephant.
Of course, this illustration may be
somewhat overblown, but
specialization does have a way of warping our thinking: The psychologist
gives a psychological explanation to everything, whereas the engineer
interprets life in terms of scientific cause and effect. The entrepreneur sees
an opportunity lurking behind every corner, and the politician views every
individual as a potential voter to be persuaded.
So, can theories actually be divided into elephants and gnats, or does
every idea carry equal weight? How does one distinguish an elephant from
A I am using a humorous analogy in order to get a point across. The
Exhorter person, who combines Teacher thought with Mercy thinking, is
usually most guilty of using Mercy feelings to inflate the generality of a
Teacher concept. However, the Teacher person may also commit a similar
crime. By choosing to concentrate upon some particular explanation, he
effectively turns it into an „elephant,‟ regardless of its actual size. In the
same way that the unsettled Mercy person clings to emotional experiences
which are „safe,‟ so the immature Teacher person can clutch on to his
favorite theories.
Universal Truth?