Doublespeak. William LutzЧитать онлайн книгу.
what is pretty ordinary—teaching children and running a school—sound very complex and difficult. Doublespeak in this realm can also be used to avoid some harsh realities and to soothe some hurt feelings.
The Parkway School District of West St. Louis County, in its Report to the Community 1987–88,
expresses the belief that the success of its students can be maximized through the development of a comprehensive Wellness Program targeted toward assisting the total community—employees, students and parents—in maintaining optimal wellness. The Wellness model is a comprehensive program that includes the physical dimension (fitness and nutrition), the social dimension, the intellectual dimension, and occupational, emotional and spiritual consideration.
I would be surprised if anyone in that school district had the faintest idea what all this verbiage meant, but it sure sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
Sometimes it seems as if schools are competing with each other for the thickest doublespeak. The St. Vrain Valley School District in Longmont, Colorado published a booklet titled Blueprint for Excellence, in which it announced, “Our mission is to educate students so they may approach their full potential in: Pursuing post-secondary educational endeavors. Achieving economic self-sufficiency. Continuing their personal pursuit of learning throughout life. Relating successfully to people, institutions and value systems in all aspects of life.”
Once they had impressed everyone with this education doublespeak, the writers of the booklet translated it for their readers. In clear language, they stated that what their schools-tried to do was make sure that “Students were prepared to succeed in college, business or vocational school. Students are able to support themselves financially. Students are eager to learn wherever they go. Students are able to get along with people.” Now, why didn’t they just say that in the first place?
Simple, clear language just isn’t impressive enough for many people in education. It seems they want to impress others with how hard their jobs are and how smart they have to be in order to do their jobs. After all, if anyone can understand it, then it can’t be very special. So the doublespeak flows, especially when it comes time to write a grant proposal. After all, in order to get the government or a foundation to give you money, you’ve got to convince officials that what it is you’re going to do with their money is worth doing and only you can do it.
As part of its proposal for a Title III grant from the federal government, a community college in Washington stated this as one of its major goals: “To organize a comprehensive process of assessment, teaching strategies, learning support, and intervention which effectively promotes student success in acquiring the skills and knowledge leading to satisfying and productive lives.” Of course, they would never have gotten their grant if they had written something like, “We’re going to teach these kids so they learn what they need to know to get along in life.”
Education doublespeak, especially among academics who want to impress everyone with how intelligent they are, has been around for a long time. Even W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) commented on it, as you can see in these lyrics he wrote in 1881 for a song in the opera Patience:
If you’re anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
And everyone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”
A glance at most academic journals would leave readers overwhelmed by academic doublespeak and nodding their heads in agreement with Gilbert’s lines. But this is to be expected, says Professor Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. According to Armstrong, there are some important rules to follow if you want to publish an article in a scientific or medical journal. In an article in a 1982 issue of the Journal of Forecasting, Armstrong recommends that the aspiring scholar choose an unimportant topic, agree with existing beliefs, use convoluted methods, withhold some of the data, and write the article in stilted, obtuse prose. Armstrong reports that, in one study, academics reading articles in scientific journals rated the authors’ competence higher when the writing was less intelligible than when it was clear. Other studies conclude that obscure writing helps those who have little to say. In other words, in academia, as in most professions, doublespeak pays.
A recent issue of the American Sociological Review carried an article that stated,
In effect, it was hypothesized that certain physical data categories including housing types and densities, land use characteristics, and ecological location, constitute a scalable content area. This could be called a continuum of residential desirabilities. Likewise, it was hypothesized that several social strata categories, describing the same census tracts, and referring generally to the social stratification system of the city, would also be scalable. This scale could be called a continuum of socio-economic status. Thirdly, it was hypothesized that there would be a high positive correlation between the scale types of each continuum.
In ether words, rich people live in big houses in nice neighborhoods.
Not to be outdone by the sociologists, the prestigious journal PMLA (for Publications of the Modern Language Association, a major organization of scholars of English and foreign languages and literature) published an article in its October 1981 issue that contained this gem:
We have now come to see, however, that the partitioning of art and history derives from a false dichotomy. Historical awareness is a construing of records already encoded, which can only be interpreted according to a historical poetics. And Active ideologies are the stuff of history, which must be comprehended by linguistic and dramatistic analysis. All cultural phenomena are artifacts, at once real and Active. This binocular perspective enables us to restore enacted courtesy, courtesy as lived, to the realm of poetic performance and to consider anew what such a way of living would have been like.
The entire article and most of the issue were written in similar prose, as is every issue of the journal.
A 1972 issue of the Antioch Review carried a review that contained such typical scholarly prose as this: “. . . Monod is constrained to use the word ‘teleonomy,’ which stands for living ‘objects endowed with a purpose or project,’ and which includes the genetic replication of such purpose. Yet in no way is this to be confused with ‘teleology’ à la Aristotle, or with final causation, and certainly not with ‘animism,’ which is the projection of organic teleonomy into the universe itself. This is the author’s bête noir, and his stable extends from Plato through Leibnitz and Hegel, down to dialectical materialism. . . .” After reading these examples of scholarly prose, we can better understand “the germs of the transcendental terms” Gilbert was writing about over one hundred years ago. As we have seen, scholarly prose hasn’t changed much since then.
In their article, “Needs Assessment and Holistic Planning,” published in the May 1981 issue of Educational Leadership, authors Roger Kaufman and Robert Stakevas point out that “in order to achieve products, outputs, and outcomes through processes, inputs are required.” An article titled “The Collection of Data About the Nature and Degree of Curriculum Implementation,” published in the January 1985 issue of the CCSEDC Quarterly, states that “the significantly lower scores of implementers in their informational, personal, and management concerns suggest the wisdom of investigating means to raise these concerns, perhaps through increasing curriculum visibility.”
Drop into any meeting of just about any academic society, organization, or group, and you’ll find even the titles of the papers being presented incomprehensible. At the 1984 meeting of the Association for Education