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What Are We Thinking? What Are We Saying?

by John Holdren

Every field has its jargon, its specialized terms and phrases. Lawyers have their writs, torts, and depositions. Doctors speak not of cuts or scrapes but lesions. Computer specialists banter about baud rates, RAM, and downloading. 

In the legal, medical, and other scientific fields, such jargon is usually employed for the sake of technical accuracy. But can the same be said for the jargon of education?

Many parents say that they sometimes find the jargon of education mystifying and intimidating. When I stop and think about it, I have to agree with them. 

Unlike scientific and legal jargon, educational jargon often has no concrete referent: that is, many of the words refer to no concrete thing or specific action. Some terms — such as "holistic" or "process-based" or "mastery learning" — have little more apparent substance than the dust that blows from erasers clapped together at the end of a school day. 

I point this out in an attempt to make educators — myself included — hear the way we speak. In my head and yours, I want an alarm to sound — buzzers, bells, the Stars and Stripes Forever — whenever we say or hear a term that only we as educators are likely to use. When this alarm sounds, it should trip a little mental tape loop that asks, "Why am I using this word or term? What does it really mean? What is my motivation for employing this specialized jargon?" 

Sometimes our motivation for using jargon is relatively benign, as when we engage in the little acts of conformity that hold all groups together. At such times we are, in effect, repeating rather than speaking. Speaking is (or should be) saying (or trying to say) what we mean. Repeating is saying what we have heard others say and what we think others expect us to know — so, even though we may not know exactly what it means, we say it. Our speech resounds with echoes: "This school believes in literature-based and child-centered instruction with an emphasis on collaborative decision-making, hands-on learning, developmentally appropriate strategies, and authentic assessment." 

There's a point, however, at which this relatively benign use of jargon — which shows that we're part of the group, aware of the latest trends — becomes less benign. Because to belong to any group is also to exclude others from the group. 

I fear that sometimes our educational jargon is a kind of verbal secret handshake that says, "No outsiders allowed." This is especially worrisome when the outsiders are those whom we need to be our allies: parents in particular, and the public in general. More times than I care to admit, I have, both in my former work as a teacher and my current work with schools, heard myself and my fellow educators use jargon to elevate ourselves to a position of intimidating expertise from which we look down on all those poor benighted parents who clamor about "the basics" when, after all, they haven't a clue about how education is a complex process that unfolds in Piagetian stages and requires developmentally appropriate strategies suited to each child's unique learning styles in a cooperative, problem-based, meaning-centered instructional environment. Why, they don't even know what Bloom's Taxonomy is! 

If we use jargon to exclude, to obscure, or to mystify, then eliminating jargon from our speech is more than a matter of aesthetic fine-tuning: it is a moral imperative. 

In his trenchant essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell observed that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Does the jargon of education "corrupt" our thought? I suspect it often takes the place of thought, or is employed thoughtlessly. And this cannot be good for a profession that places a high premium on critical thinking — or rather, I should say, on thinking. 

What is to be done? It may help to begin by trying to recognize the words and phrases that make up some of the jargon of education. As a tentative first step, far from authoritative or comprehensive, I offer the results of a brief perusal of recent issues some mainstream education publications (Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, and Teacher magazine). Highlighter in hand, I skimmed the pages, marking any term or phrase that seemed likely to turn up often or only in an education publication. At the end of this essay you will find the results of my informal survey, organized in two lists: adjectives and nouns. 

If you look over the lists, you may notice that you can take almost any adjective, combine it with one of the nouns, and, voila, you have a plausible-sounding educational expression. Of course you must weed out the obvious absurdities (such as "shared risk-takers") and redundancies (such as "assessment-driven assessment"). But once you've done that, it's eerily easy to come up with terms that mean little but sound right at home on, say, an ASCD conference agenda featuring sessions on "authentic competencies," "brain-compatible curriculum integration," "meaning-centered holistic paradigms," "process-based learning styles," "technology-enhanced problem-solving," and "inquiry-centered critical-thinking strategies." 

How can we make our language more concrete and precise? I, for one, propose to begin modestly with a New Year's resolution that sets a possible and measurable goal: in this case, not in pounds (that's another resolution), but in hyphens. If you glance at the terms below, you may notice that the hyphen is sprinkled into educational jargon like salt on McDonald's french fries. Thus, in order to minimize the use of educational jargon, I resolve to undertake a low-salt — rather, low-hyphen — verbal diet, and cut down on the use of terms like "open-ended," "higher-order," and "problem-based."

Here, then, are the results of my brief survey of a few educational publications. Almost any adjective on the left can be, and perhaps has been, combined with almost any noun on the right. But do these verbal combinations reflect any solid or useful meanings?

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Last updated: Fri, March 14 2008