The Learner and The Butterfly: A Story with Analogies

The Learner and The Butterfly

Last Sunday I read this story on a post on LinkedIn. It is the story of the caterpillar and the butterfly. It suddenly struck me, that it was just the same with learners.

The story goes, some school children were watching a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. They felt sorry for it as it struggled and struggled to extract itself through the tiny hole it had made. Eventually it succeeded and lay there, exhausted. Eventually, slowly, it opened its wings, and finally flew away.

The children saw the same process happening with another cocoon, and not wanting to see this poor butterfly suffer, they cut open the cocoon and freed the butterfly. The bedraggled creature lay on the surface for a while, and then died. The children were sad.

The teacher explained, that the struggle to get out of the cocoon was part of the process. The process of struggling forced fluids up the narrow network of tubes within the wings, and this allowed the wings to unfold and become rigid, so that the butterfly could fly away. When the children helped the 2nd one, the fluids did not get pumped into the wings, and so they did not expand and unfold, it could not fly away, and so died.

Get the analogy?