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The Roots and Perils of Eduspeak—The Language of Pretense and Evasionby Cynthia Rurak A form of jargon called “Eduspeak” is creeping into classrooms across the country, intimidating parents and complicating learning, yet many teachers seem largely blind to it. News media articles in Canada and the US report that the convoluted jargon of the professional educator is making its way into classrooms. But appeals from confused parents and outside professionals that teachers use plain language will have little effect until the ideas that have long been driving the jargon change. It Can’t Happen Here … Can It?Linda Perlstein, reporting on the proliferation of “educationese” in American schools for the Washington Post, says that since starting as an education writer six years ago, she has seen the jargon employed at the higher levels of the education system—in the schools of education and by the bureaucrats—permeate the classroom. For Canadian students, Perlstein’s report foreshadows things to come, if not what is already here. Greg Gribbon, Director of the Ontario-based Organization for Quality Education, says “virtually every education fad that Ontario has experienced, and continues to experience, at least since the 1960s, comes from the US.” Like the canary in the coalmine, recent news stories in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post suggesting that the spread of academic bafflegab into Canada’s schoolrooms has already begun bear Gribbon out. At the Teepee Creek School in Alberta, for example, students who used to read now engage in “USSR—Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading.” Instead of comparing books, fifth and sixth graders at Grace Martin Elementary School in Edmonton make “text-to-text connections,” while high schoolers at the Don Mills Collegiate Institute in Toronto write “longer constructed responses” rather than the simpler essay. Misbehaving students from Emily Carr Middle School in British Columbia to Jockvale Elementary School in Ottawa no longer face detention—they go to a “Reflection Room” to talk, to sort out difficulties, and to, well, reflect. When Jargon Is Not Really JargonTo its critics, the practice of calling grades “outcomes,” tests “assessments,” and libraries “learning resource centres” is pretentious, designed to make educators look smart at the expense of clarity. While jargon has its functions, creating a kind of cohesiveness among group members, the use of professional “in-talk” with parents puts up a barrier to communication, says Malkin Dare, a mother of two university-aged children who is a member of the Organization for Quality Education. Widener University education professor Edward Rozycki goes further, describing Eduspeak as “a language of hypocrisy … of indecision, of hesitation, of reluctance, of prissiness and of indirection—all those things that undermine the formation of courage, steadfastness, forthrightness, and commitment.” Yet some classroom educators defend the use of such convoluted and evasive language. Explaining why disruptive children now have reflection time instead of a detention at LaSalle Public School near Windsor, principal Fran Pohanka says they don’t want to use the term “detention.” “It has a negative connotation. We find ‘reflection’ to be a kinder, gentler thing to say.” Even Susan, a reform-minded teacher in the Toronto School District who wishes to remain anonymous, sees the reflection sheets her students fill out as a more enlightened way to discipline children, rather than a politically correct whitewash. “I don’t notice that much jargon in the classroom,” she says, “just in the Blob—the teachers’ unions, school board officials, ministries of education, textbook publishers, and the faculties of education that make up the education system.” The Language of LearningLike the frog in the pot of boiling water, some teachers don’t seem to notice the rising level of polysyllabic jargon in their classrooms, perhaps because they have been immersed in it for too long. A study of manuals from 100 teacher training programs around the world by Martin Kozloff, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington, suggests that teachers’ colleges function as induction centres into the jargon, normalizing its use. This practice would be acceptable if the jargon were useful, providing a shortcut to a concept commonly used in the field or precisely defining a complicated idea. But Kozloff complains that the lingo only paints a sophisticated veneer on the obvious, the empty, and the banal. “It’s unmatched twaddle. Unbelievable bilge. Absolutely staggering nonsense.” Susannah Kelly’s experience in her first year as a teacher suggests that many of the latest buzzwords bandied about at teachers’ conferences and professional development centres are shallow and puffed up. Warned by a professor at the University of Ottawa to expect a flood of jargon that, though popular today, will be gone tomorrow, Kelly reports that she has already encountered many words, such as “rubric” (a type of assessment strategy), and acronyms like KWL (Know, Want to Know, Learned), that make the teaching profession bewildering and esoteric. Although buzzwords come and go, jargon has been around a long time, making its recognition near impossible. According to University of Victoria, British Columbia, education professor Thomas Fleming, the arrival of “bafflegab” began decades ago as part of a strategy among educators, academics, and bureaucrats to gain professional status. But the author of Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform, educational historian Diane Ravitch, says that Eduspeak dates back nearly a century to a coterie of academics known as “educational engineers” who sought to revolutionize schools by turning education into a science. We Don’t Need No Thought ControlAccording to Ravitch, academic jargon has been around since at least the 1920s, ever since progressive reform theorists, believing that the education system was too complex to be entrusted to parents and teachers, argued that “curriculum experts” should rule. Many of jargon’s critics believe that this desire to promote a particular agenda and maintain a grip on power has given the lexicon of academia a darker, more sinister aspect, which is evident in the name used to describe it—Eduspeak. Eduspeak derives from George Orwell’s “Newspeak,” a word Orwell coined in his novel 1984 to describe the language used by the totalitarian regime of the Party. Newspeak was instituted to enhance the power of the state over the individual by making subversive thought and speech impossible. You don’t have to go far to find those who say that Eduspeak, like Newspeak, deliberately uses ambiguous and contradictory language to mislead and manipulate the public. Ryerson Review of Journalism reporter Quinn Underhill contends that Eduspeak, “the language used to cloud rather than explain an issue, is the mother tongue of most educators.” Sue-Ann Levy, a reporter for the Toronto Sun who used to cover education topics, says that high-priced education bureaucrats would use this “bureaucratese” or Eduspeak in reports, at board meetings with the public or parents, and in media interviews. “I saw its use not just as a means of hiding the truth but as a way of showing superiority over those not in the education world, a way of saying ‘we know best.’ It was certainly used to intimidate parents, and the media, so they wouldn’t ask too many questions.” Former Ontario college teacher Barry Kavanagh agrees. “Although jargon is used by bureaucrats of all kinds to facilitate their own interactions, it seems to me that, in education, bureaucrats additionally employ jargon to keep their real agenda (the socialization of students) and their dismal academic results hidden from parents and taxpayers.” A Romantic EducationThe progressive reform movement has influenced generations of Canadian teachers and continues to dominate the thought of most of Canada’s educational theoreticians, says William Brooks, a former McGill University education professor. Inspired by the ideas of John Dewey, progressive education promotes the ideas of child-centred education, social reconstructionism (fundamental changes in the social and economic structure of society), active citizen participation in all spheres of life, and democratization of all public institutions. With Dewey’s “disciples,” as Brooks calls them, turning these ideas—and their corresponding jargon—into “a new educational orthodoxy,” new and idealistic teachers can hardly be expected to commit apostasy by rejecting such establishment terms as “child-centred,” “holistic,” “constructivist,” and “developmentally appropriate.” In tracing the intellectual roots of progressive education, university professor, author, and founder of the Virginia-based Core Knowledge Foundation, E. D. Hirsch Jr. suggests that the task of turning jargon into plain language is near Herculean. Claiming that parents and the larger society outside of teachers’ colleges share the philosophy that nurtures and organizes progressivism, Hirsch Jr. points out that “if progressivism were not consonant with received ideas in the larger public about children and schools, the ideas would not maintain their sway.” According to Hirsch Jr., the inspiration for progressive education stems from Romanticism, a philosophy that has a lineage stretching back to Jean Jacques Rousseau and Herbert Spencer. The translation of Romanticism’s propositions into the tenets of progressive education has resulted in education jargon, a terminology so pervasive, says Hirsch Jr., we take it for granted. The Romantic, for example, wants integration and natural development, as happens in the natural world. Thus, progressive education champions “whole language,” “integrated learning,” and “developmental appropriateness” in the classroom. Kelly’s experience with jargon at the University of Ottawa and in conference rooms bears this out. She reports hearing teachers talk about “intrinsic” and “extrinsic motivation,” “integrated classrooms,” “multiple learning styles,” “the discovery learning method of teaching,” and students who are “sensing learning”—all terms that reveal their roots in Romanticism. Words and World-ViewsTeachers, initiated into the thought-world of progressivism at schools of education, and parents, as at home in the Romantic world-view as any educator, come to see its spawn, education jargon, as necessary, even normal. Eduspeak functions in this normalizing process much like Orwell’s Newspeak: it provides a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of progressive ideas and Romanticism, and, arguably, makes a thought diverging from the principles of progressivism unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. But what, exactly, is this world-view? According to the author of Education in a Free Society. An American History, Alexander Rippa, educational reformers from the 1890s to 1930s believed that their new education program, based on the development of co-operative social skills, critical thinking and democratic behaviours, could play a pivotal role in transforming a society of greed, individualism, waste, and corruption for one based on compassion, humanism, and equality. Kozloff sees the education program of those early reformers as an extension of a view that prevails to this day. The Romantic world-view rejects the modern world (technology, globalism) and its social institutions and value orientations; for example, capitalism (seen as aggressive, greedy, destructive), representative government (seen as authoritarian), the middle-class family (seen as patriarchal, stressing hard work and self-denial—no fun), organized religion (imposing an external morality), and schools (oppressive, biased towards dead, white, patriarchal, western Europeans). Such a view of the world should not be surprising. According to James Birrell, a professor of teacher education at Brigham Young University, Dewey’s ideals, and those of other “social revolutionaries, re-engineers, and revisionists,” are relativist, utopian, and socialist. Brooks goes so far as to claim that Dewey found Marxism useful, if not indispensable, to the formation of his educational theories. Kieran Egan, the Canadian author of Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget, calls the progressivist thought-world a “catastrophe” for teachers, their students, and the culture at large, and blames it for a host of problems, from its present-minded, experimental, experiential, naturalistic teaching approaches to its dumbing-down influence on the curriculum. What disturbs Birrell and others like him is
that these “soft-utopian, anti-religious, social justice through
government sponsored redistribution of individual wealth ideas”
form the fundamental thought-world of teachers’ colleges and
schools of education, and that few teachers escape teacher education
programs without exposure to them. Hirsch Jr. points out that it isn’t
until there is a change in the dominant ideas ruling education that
we can expect effective education reform—or plain language in
place of jargon. ReferencesAeschliman, M. D. “Cults of Ignorance. ‘Getting
It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Birrell, James R. “Avoiding the Miseducating
of our Minds.” Meridian Magazine. Brooks, William. “Was Dewey a Marxist?” Discourse
13 (Winter 1994) St. Lawrence Institute Helfand, Duke. “‘Edspeak’ Is in a Class
by Itself.” Los Angeles Times. 16 August 2001. GTA Hirsch Jr., E. D. “The Roots of the
Education War.” 2001. Catholic Educator’s Resource Center. Kozloff, Martin. “Enlightenment Ideas and
the Anti-Establishment Critique.” October 2003. Perlstein, Linda. “Talking the Edutalk.
Jargon Becoming Prevalent in the Classroom.” Rozycki, Edward G. “Service? Learning?”
1999. Edward G. Rozycki. [26 May 2004] Schmidt, Sarah. “Educators Drop Plain
Speaking for Bafflegab.” Ottawa Citizen. Smyth, Julie. “Education Language: A lesson
in Confusion.” National Post. 6 September 2001. Underhill, Quinn. “The Daily Dunce.” Ryerson
Review of Journalism. (Spring 2002)
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