The BBC article "Lesson one: no Orwellian language"suggests that education has somehow been undermined through the corruption of the very language used to discuss education itself.
Professor Richard Pring of Oxford University believes that education has been taken over by an "Orwellian language" which has started to control the way we think and act, pointing out how the aims and values of education has become "dominated by the language of management."
More examples of this language are:
- When judging schools and universities we now talk about "performance indicators" as a substitute for assessing the quality of their teaching.
- Learning has to be measured by an "audit" of the qualifications achieved rather than a more qualitative judgement of what students have learned.
- They talk about "new providers" instead of schools.
- Repeated phrases refer to "efficiency gains", "choice for customers", "the market", and "funding systems that respond to customer demand".
- The phraseology of "inputs" and "outputs" is more like the language of industrial production than of education. It implies there is an exact specification for the finished product.
- Hence we now have "enterprise" as a compulsory part of the school curriculum, while history, geography and foreign languages are no longer required after the age of 14.
In "Is Media a Danger to Democracy?", Robert Parry believes that a kind of a "new-age capitalistic determinism" has gained adherence among many influential journalists and thinkers.
Parry also believes that this partly explains the media's decline in covering significant affairs of state, with news debased into "content," as the out-dated need for a well-informed public fades away. Except for the stock prices and business news, information slides into entertainment.
Parry asks, "But how did this happen? What transformed the Watergate press corps of the mid-1970s, which asked grand questions about serious government misconduct, into today's media which can be alternately frivolous, petulant and obsequious?"
In his article, Parry tries to outline the answers to this question through three books that examine the crucial changes in media over the past quarter century, and subsequently media's threat to democracy:
The first, published in 1996, is Kathryn S. Olmsted's challenging the Secret Government. It examines the awakening of skepticism within the U.S. news media and the Congress in the mid-1970s.
The second is Edward Herman's The Myth of the Liberal Media, which reviews the media's acquiescence to the Reagan administration's implausible propaganda during the 1980s.
The third is Robert W. McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy, a study of the rapid concentration of media power during the l990s.
McChesney wrote in "Rich Media, Poor Democracy", "In many respects, we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena."
The abovementioned articles suggest that the model of workforce preparation and employability in corporate media and a dumbing down of public debate in society dominates mainstream education and socio-political discourse.
Do you think that this is true? Why or why not? What current events in your country and society support your views?
Are you concerned about the "dumbing of public debate"? About the commercial and market oriented approach to education? If so, what can be done about it?
What do you think is meant by "Orwellian language"? What are the implications in the life of a society dominated by that language? Are we now dominated by "Orwellian language"? How?
Is the "digital age" or "information age" an example of this "Orwellian language"?
