Focusing on educational metaphors, the study sets out to explore the metaphorical construal of such ontological factors in Chinese and English education as teacher, learner and teaching, and to explain the similarities and differences of metaphor in education in both contexts by using cultural and cognitive models. It is found that there are similarities between Chinese and English in the use of more abstract primary metaphors with common experiential bases and representative cognitive models; in contrast, there are cross-lingual differences in the use of less abstract metaphors, which reflects different cognitive and cultural models in both languages.