Dialogue: A pox on perpetrators of abominable jargon

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Among the many letters I received in response to my article three weeks ago on the jargon-ridden report by the Education Review Office was one from the ERO's chief review officer, Judith E. Aitken.

She writes: "Review officers work in the professional education sphere where terms such as achievement criteria, bulk funding, barriers to learning, curriculum objectives and academic pathways are, to teachers, familiar shorthand for some quite complicated concepts.

"ERO's reports are primarily for the boards of trustees and the professional educators in each school or early childhood centre. These are people who need to understand the education shorthand because the terms are in legislation, policy documents and Ministry of Education guidelines."

First, most of the letters I received agreeing that the reports are replete with meaningless jargon were from schools trustees and teachers (including a university professor of education) - the very people for whom, Ms Aitken insists, these reports are tailored.

Secondly, it has always been the defence of jargon writers that their subject is so complex that ordinary language is inadequate. I once edited a magazine whose contributors were mostly scientists. The best of them could write prose that I could easily understand, with the occasional need to look up scientific words. The few who wrote in jargon were almost always the second-raters.

Thirdly, Ms Aitken doesn't understand verbal precision - that bulk-funding has a reasonably precise meaning but achievement criteria, barriers to learning, curriculum objectives and academic pathways don't.

Fourthly, the argument that vague phrases are used in official documents is hardly a defence for perpetuating them and inflicting them on others.

The biggest joke is her use of the word shorthand. Lets take a couple of those sentences from the report:

"Where appropriate, staff could consider differentiating curriculum objectives and learning outcomes over more than one curriculum level. Given the wide range of abilities and needs of students within each class, it is important to recognise that not all students will necessarily be working at the same curriculum level in each essential learning area. More consistent differentiation of leaning objectives would help teachers to refine their teaching programmes to meet the diverse needs of students in each class."

That sentence seems to be shorthand for something like: "Students within each class have different learning abilities. Staff should try to adapt their teaching programmes to meet the needs of individuals." If it means more than that, perhaps the ERO could let me know. Otherwise, having to tell a qualified teacher that seems like telling a dentist to make sure a patient's mouth is open before applying the drill.

It may be a worry that this sort of rubbish disguised as prose exists, but it is terrifying that Judith E. Aitken doesn't accept it's a problem. The only concession she makes is: "The very fact that ERO produces information that is useful and interesting to such a breadth of readers means that we must work harder to make our reports readable and understandable to them all."

I have to agree that if there is useful and interesting information embedded in this report, it will be wonderful for them all (which includes me) to discover it through readability and understanding. But what sort of an educational institution puts secondary value on writing competently?

(One ERO staff member confided that the language in the reports is a worry and seemed perplexed about what to do. The answer is for the ERO to hire a competent editor to slash and burn through the jargon and make the report writers say what they mean.)

The danger is - and more than one correspondent pointed this out - that the ERO has such power over teachers and trustees that it can inflict this abominable language on them without fear of being criticised for it. If advertising copywriters, journalists and other communicators write like this, people would just ignore it, screw it up and throw it away. But the careers of recipients of these reports may be jeopardised by such honesty.

And it's not confined to education. One of my correspondents tells me that the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology's manager for investment operations tells science providers that the system is "outcome orientated," that there exists a "negotiated portfolio purchasing system" and that the goal is "to grow the innovation system."

This modern gibberish derives partly from the 1980s philosophy that all organised human activity is fundamentally the same, that biochemical research, health administration, manufacturing widgets, teaching children, painting houses, writing poetry and playing the violin can all be managed and the results measured in terms of funders and providers, inputs and outputs.

Not that jargon is new. Politicians and officials have long tended to write obscurely because it adds mystique to their roles and inflates their self-importance. Clarity may reveal how little they know and how little they do.

William Cobbett was scolding them 200 years ago and George Orwell 50 years ago. But in Britain, at least, some effort has been made by governments, by the legal profession, educators and others to insist on reasonable standards of writing by officials.

Here, nobody seems to care a damn.