If we can't trust even the people who teach our children to keep classrooms free of bamboozling jargon, then just who can we rely on to facilitate assessment-driven developmentally appropriate curriculum compacting? Who will be responsible for synthesising disciplinary niches? Let alone for contextualising child-centered outcomes?
The Nuffield Review of education and training for 14 to 19-year-olds today awards a delta minus to those in the education world who have forsaken plain English in favour of expressing their policies and goals in a language more familar to readers of George Orwell's 1984.
The review laments the way that the foggy vocabulary of performance management has infected how the Government talks about education. Pupils have become consumers. Curriculums are delivered. Success is measured by audits. Where is the language of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who saw education as an initiation into the world of ideas, a world that evolved from the conversation between the generations of mankind, and was fed by the voices of poetry, of science, of history, of philosophy? Today, by contrast, we charge teachers with the duty of delivering knowledge to meet targets. Today government agencies actually use the word performativity.
The trouble is that what happens in the classroom doesn't stay in the classroom. Pupils leave school believing that adults communicate in a jargon that deliberately muddies what they mean. Next thing you know, there are grown-ups saying things such as “midday food-based interface” when they mean lunch; and saying “Today is a day for working, not resigning”, when what they actually mean is: “Yikes! I'm too scared to jump.”