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THE ALFALFA SEED PARABLE

Table of Contents:

Why parables?
Voice from the back of the lecture hall
Hug O' War and Tug of Peace
The Alfalfa Seed Parable
Teachers Also Must Learn - Charles Insco Gragg
A Conflict Resolved With Bananas - Ruth E. Bergevin

Choose One to read:
Click if you are a Scientist.
Click if you are a mother, daughter or wife.
Click if you are an American.
Click if you are an older person.
Click if you are none of the above.

Why do they hate us? (Doubting vs. Believing)
Webs and Ladders
Finale: Revenge? Reconciliation? Resurrection?

Why parables?

Science is a way of knowing. Science strives to be objective. Science focuses on knowledge based on replicable experiments aimed at eliminating the false and accepting the true. Science relies on statistics to determine what is true, and statistics summarize trends in populations; the larger the population, the better. To science and the scientist, anecdotal evidence is dismissed as unreplicable; as subjective and therefore biased.

But anecdotes and their relatives: parables, poems, myths, stories, koans and the like, are another way of knowing. They provide us with a way of understanding individual experience in the context of the larger society and culture. They expand our experience; show us the world in a new light, or reinforce what we did not realize that we already knew. Parables do this by presenting a concrete and particular case whose meaning we are left to discover ourselves. We may not succeed, but when we do, we realize that any attempt to express the meaning in words would not be as successful as the realization that came from example.

A relevant quote