Doublespeak. William Lutz
phrasing; it’s selective development,” said George Johnson, president of George Mason University. In Indiana they have a program called “quality recovery,” while in Minnesota it’s called “preventive retention.” Colleges don’t talk of looking for students to boost their enrollment. Instead, they talk about “posturing ourselves aggressively and positively to enhance our position in the enrollment marketplace” and “aggressively enhancing retention through positive recruitment and advisement programs.”
Parents are told “there will be a modified English course offered for those children who achieve a deficiency in English.” Children who talk to themselves “engage in audible verbal self-reinforcement,” while children who disrupt class have an “attention deficit disorder.” And children who have poor “graphomotor representation” just have lousy handwriting. Kids don’t even cheat on tests anymore. According to a 1985 report by the Chicago Board of Education, an audit of scores on a reading test showed that “something irregular happened that can’t be explained by chance.”
Teachers are “educators” these days, or “classroom managers,” or “learning facilitators” who possess effective “instructional delivery skills” which they demonstrate in “microteaching sessions.” Teaching is called the “learning process” and learning is called “adjusted behavior.” Students don’t study, they spend “time on task” in their “learning environment.” Students who skip school don’t have to worry about the truant officer. If they live in New York they worry about the “attendance teacher.” My eight-year-old stepdaughter has already become so imbued with education doublespeak that she insisted she did not take swimming lessons. It’s “instructional swim,” she informed me and her mother.
Teachers rarely test students these days. Instead they “implement an evaluation program,” “conduct a needs assessment,” (or, better yet, “implement a needs assessment strategy”), or prepare an “analysis of readiness skills” using an “evaluation tool (or instrument).” At Taft Junior High School in San Diego, California, students don’t pass a grade, they “articulate.” When students select the subjects they want to take in the next grade, it’s called “articulation.” Students ride to school on a “transportation component” which is operated by a “certified adolescent transportation specialist.” When teachers go on a camping trip, it becomes an “outdoor education interdepartmental articulation conference.” Even the coaches get in on the doublespeak when they call a stopwatch an “ascending timing device” or a “descending timing device.”
The best schools are up on all the latest theories in education. First, you should remember that the very best schools aren’t schools at all but “primary or secondary educational institutions” where “empirical–rational,” “normative–re-educative,” or “power–coercive” strategies of learning address the “situational parameters” through a variety of “implementation approaches,” taking into account “multidisciplinary methodologies” in an “ecocultural framework,” as educators develop “brain-based programs” of “content-specificity.” Dedicated teachers, while worried about the burden of “excessive horizontal job enlargement,” will still engage in a “healthy interface” in a “dual-communication mode of highly interactive student-oriented teacher methodology” designed to promote and enhance a child’s “learning style” in “life-coping skills.”
Teachers have learned to translate the doublespeak of educational researchers, administrators, and public officials. When the Illinois Board of Higher Education said “internal reallocation,” “institutional self-help,” “negative base adjustment,” “productivity increases,” and “personal services,” teachers knew that the board meant budget cuts. Teachers knew also that “financial exigency” meant layoffs, and “institutional flexibility” meant administrators can do whatever they want without consulting the faculty as to the effect their decisions will have on the quality of the education offered to students. And “deferred maintenance” meant not doing needed painting, cleaning, and minor repairs, while “substantial deferred maintenance” meant not doing major repairs.
In Rochester, New York, a memorandum was sent to all teachers in independent school district no. 535 in 1983 offering “Staff Development Workshops” for those “who are considering, or would like to investigate a change of careers.” The workshops were designed for those teachers who were being laid off and to encourage others to leave the teaching profession voluntarily. That’s one way to develop the staff. The school board in the Cleveland, Ohio school system did not lay off 141 administrators in 1982, it “nonrenewed” them.
Wherever teachers turn, they are confronted with doublespeak. A research report published by the Educational Testing Service in 1985 on how children learn to read said that “The children’s preference for strategy was most clearly evident when they were near the limits of their capacity and needed to allocate their resources to optimal advantage.” The Wharton Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business does not make a profit but runs a “negative deficit.” Educational researchers write of “knowledge-base possessors” and “knowledge-base non-possessors.” When Texas passed a law in 1985 preventing students who have grades of “F” from participating in such extracurricular activities as football, Eddie Joseph, president of the Texas High School Coaches’ Association, said of such students, “They’re not failing; they’re deficient at a grading period.”
Doublespeak permeates all areas of society, so there is no reason why education shouldn’t be infected as well. However, education doublespeak is particularly depressing because, more than anyone, teachers should be aware of doublespeak. They should be leading the fight against doublespeak by teaching their students how to spot it, how to defend themselves against it, and how to eliminate it in their own writing and speaking. Unfortunately, too many in education have found that using doublespeak can advance their careers and their pay, so they have decided to give in to it.
Doublespeak in Medicine
You may have a gall bladder operation, but to the surgeon it’s a cholecystectomy. You come down with a cold, but the doctor calls it simple acute rhinitis, or coryza. You have a black eye or a shiner, but the doctor calls it hematoma of the eyelid. Medical doublespeak? No, not at all. Just because doctors talk in that technical language of theirs doesn’t mean they’re using doublespeak. The foregoing examples are simply precise medical terms, and there’s nothing wrong with them, as long as doctors use them among themselves. But there is plenty of other language used in the medical profession that is pure doublespeak.
After developing a new machine that uses sonic waves to crush kidney stones, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital called the machine the “extracorporeal shockwave lithotripter,” which makes you want to ask if this tripter was necessary. Then there’s the article in the American Journal of Family Practice that called fleas “hematophagous arthropod vectors.” Try using that in the song, “My Dog Has Fleas.” If you leap off a tall building you will, in the words of the medical profession, suffer “sudden deceleration trauma” when you hit the ground.
In today’s medical doublespeak, aging is called “cell drop out,” or the “decreased propensity for cell replication.” There are hospitals that don’t treat sick people anymore; instead, the patient is called “a compromised susceptible host.” At Madison General Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, members of the clergy who are on the staff belong to the “Human Ecology Department,” while janitorial services are performed by the staff of “Environmental Services.” At Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana, the shop for wheelchair repairs is called the “Assistive Devices Resource Center.” In another hospital, the sign posted over the microwave oven in the nurses’ lounge lists the “rethermalization times” for different foods.
Patients aren’t constipated anymore, they just suffer from “wheelchair fatigue,” or an “alteration in self-care ability,” or an “altered elimination status.” Hospitals don’t treat VD (for venereal disease) or even STD (for sexually transmitted disease), they treat “STI” (for sexually transmitted infection). No one is addicted to drugs these days; now it’s just a “pharmacological preference.” If you’re