Edutainment

There is a campaign under way to essentially destroy the public education system along with every aspect of human life and attitudes and thought that involve social solidarity. It's being done in all sorts of ways. One is simply by underfunding. So, if you can make the public schools really rotten, people will look for an alternative. Any service that's going to be privatized, the first thing you do is make it malfunction so people can say, " We want to get rid of it. It's not running. Let's give it to Lockheed."
- Noam Chomsky, The Progressive magazine, September 1999, p37

fatima's picture

Problematization 3: Is media and the academic system a danger to intelligence?

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:

fatima's picture

Lesson One: No Orwellian Language

Lesson one: no Orwellian language. By Mike Baker. From the BBC Report

An insightful speaker raised a massive cheer from the audience at an education conference this week. No, he had not called for a doubling of teachers' pay, the abolition of national tests, or even a ban on lumpy custard in school canteens. No, his rallying cry was much simpler and involves no complex administrative changes or financial costs.

Yet it went to the heart of what education is about.

He urged everyone to stop talking about "delivery" in education and to return to talking about "teaching".

The speaker was Professor Richard Pring, of Oxford University, and he was not just being fussy about the use of language.

His point was that education has been taken over by an "Orwellian language" which has started to control the way we think and act.

Syndicate content