Feature Teachers

Can anyone tell us what something means?

There is too much jargon in the world already and I hate to reinforce it. Sometimes, however, a special word is just that.

Formalism is an idea which basically means ‘forget the content, look at the style’. Great looking things? Not exactly. A smooth delivery moreoever. A standard product for a mass-media market era. A product like education.

Education – the industry, and teaching – the delivery – are both full of jargon. New fangled ideas pop up frequently whose function is to sound sciency and so appeal to people who require the kind of self esteem boost that midwits gain from repeating things they think sound clever.

This is how jargon is reproduced. It is the life cycle of a particular kind of propaganda – that which flatters the speaker’s ignorance with an aura of superior and specialist knowledge. This aura - made out of words – is all that really exists of ‘professionalism’ these days, since integrity, ability, probity, diligence and so on are simply too unevenly distributed to…