Unveiling How Educators Manipulate Language to Shape Minds and Enforce Compliance
John Walter 📣Therapy and creativity Published in ILLUMINATION-Curated 20/05/2024
I trained as a teacher in 1984. Now, 40 years later, I can reflect on how Orwellian Newspeak, described in the book 1984, has progressed, particularly, though not exclusively, in the world of education. I will refer to it as SchoolSpeak, a new language of conformity, uniformity and compliance built by hijacking words and concepts from progressive thinkers and repurposing them.
Since Margaret Thatcher’s interventions in the education system in the 80s, aims designed to raise educational standards through standardised assessment and rigid curriculum have been critiqued for reducing educational breadth and creativity, emphasizing rote learning and test performance over holistic development.
Words such as Resilience and Empowerment have been repurposed as part of a narrative that stresses individual responsibility for success within a highly structured and competitive system rather than genuine efforts to enhance individual educational experiences or adapt to diverse learning needs.
Respected bodies like the National Education Union are calling for the abolishment of OFSTED, which has been integral to regulating this shift from holistic education to punitive and rigid regimes affecting the mental well-being of children and teachers.
NEU members have made their feelings very clear: Ofsted causes more harm than good and we need urgent and fundamental reform.
The five Words
Here are five words or phrases which have been manipulated by the educational establishment in a way that their original meaning is in danger of being lost. Teachers trained in the last 20 years have probably never heard these words used in their original context, and so the brainwashing is complete. In many cases, words that originally aimed to empower, free, inspire and encourage children are now being used to force compliance and adherence to a single-focused agenda of conformity.
- Resilience
- Creativity
- Positive Mindset
- Empowerment
- Innovation
How the words have changed
I first noticed the drift when I returned to teaching after a 15-year break. Still working in education as a successful freelance creative workshop provider, I saw that my services were no longer in vogue, so I closed the business and found some short-term supply contracts to keep me busy.
My language of child-centred, problem-solving education, seeking to empower children to become active in their own learning process, seemed to fall on deaf ears. Teachers seemed to have been trained in a pedagogy completely alien to mine. Empowerment was achieved by shovelling knowledge down children’s throats, which were coaxed open by a heady mix of threats and rewards.
I didn’t last long in this new Orwellian world of education and have since retrained in psychotherapy, where, for the present, I feel I can work with integrity and authenticity. However, I can imagine writing an article similar to this about the world of mental health in maybe ten years. The creep of regulation and uniformity is relentless. Schoolspeak and Psychspeak are the most obvious, but where else has language been repurposed to fit political narratives?
SchoolSpeak
Here goes my top pick of 5 repurposed words or phrases for the 40th anniversary of 1984.
- Resilience
The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, toughness, the ability to bounce back from challenges and adversity.
True resilience involves creative thinking, innovation, and emotional strength in the face of adversity. Being able to deal with and adapt to challenges in ways that foster personal growth and learning.
Schoolspeak has a different interpretation, which is more about conformity than creativity. I found this quote on an educational website that illustrates this. I won’t name and shame, but it was specific advice for building resilience in the classroom. This was an example about giving specific praise to build confidence.
“you’ve not gone outside of the lines once in your colouring sheet” is specific praise instead of “that’s a great picture”.
To me, that says it all. This is training teachers to focus on conformity rather than creativity. You praise sticking to the rules and colouring within the lines rather than painting outside of the lines and creating your own piece of art that expresses something about yourself. You are not building resilience in the original sense of the word. You are training children to shut down parts of themselves that question and explore, to be creative within the very narrow lines you have drawn for them.
The most common use of the word resilience I have witnessed in schools is around children who have sensory issues and become overwhelmed in a busy school environment. Resilience in this context is used to get children to mask, deny they are having difficulties, and comply with arbitrary behaviour norms.
Schools seriously wishing to develop resilience would partner with students, assessing their needs and finding ways to accommodate them. Resilience is a two-way thing. The school’s behaviour regime may be challenged, and resilience there would be shown by flexibility in the rules to accommodate individual pupils’ needs. The pupil’s difficulties and sensitivities would be acknowledged, and things would be adjusted accordingly.
2. Creativity
the ability to think about a task or a problem in a new or different way, or the ability to use the imagination to generate new ideas
The problem with a broad, expansive vision of creativity for educationalists is that they cannot measure it. So, SchoolSpeak has dumbed it down to meaning only using established bits of knowledge or traditional methods to solve problems or create work. This approach discourages truly innovative thinking, where students may challenge existing frameworks or come up with completely new and untested solutions.
Ken Robinson had a lot to say about creativity.
You can’t just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.
That view comes from the assumption that we are all born with creative and imaginative minds and that, in the current educational environment, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Creativity and creative outlets are essential for our well-being. Narrowing this down to testable nuggets is doing a disservice to our children. Education should expand horizons and stimulate imagination, not limit children to narrow intellectual pathways.
3. Positive Mindset
Approaching life’s challenges with a positive outlook. It doesn’t mean ignoring or discounting negative thoughts; it is more about seeing the positive and negative together and creating a balanced view that leads to positive solutions.
SchoolSpeak oversimplifies this concept by promoting constant positivity and disregarding valid emotional responses to challenging or unfair situations. This reinterpretation risks invalidating students’ real feelings of frustration or discontent, which are natural and can be constructive if acknowledged and managed thoughtfully.
4. Empowerment
Feeling capable and prepared to take on life’s challenges, engage with complex issues, and navigate the world as informed, responsible citizens.
This can be watered down in educational contexts in several ways. Overarchingly, the educational establishment has a distorted view that giving access to their carefully chosen selection of testable curriculum items and training children in a narrowly focused, linear direction is empowering in itself.
Many people within and beyond education think the opposite. Education in its present form disempowers children because it fails to prepare students for real-world challenges. Children are not empowered by achieving qualifications if those qualifications are seen as mere rote learning exercises. True empowerment fosters critical thinking, encourages autonomy, and allows students to influence their own learning processes and environments.
5. Innovation
Innovation in education means fostering environments where new pedagogical strategies, technologies, and curricular designs are developed and implemented. It encompasses encouraging students to think creatively, solve complex problems, and engage in interdisciplinary learning that pushes the boundaries of traditional education.
Often, “innovation” is simply used as a buzzword. Educational establishments may refer to themselves as innovative while merely creating approaches that foster compliance and adherence to a curriculum aimed at passing tests. True innovation should challenge existing paradigms and promote a culture of exploration and genuine learning.
Moving beyond SchoolSpeak
It’s clear that the educational establishment has often repurposed these five words – resilience, creativity, positive mindset, empowerment, and innovation – to fit a narrative of compliance and control.
This redefinition undermines the broader, more transformative meanings these words once held. By critically examining and reclaiming the true essence of these terms, educators, parents, and policymakers can work together to create an educational environment that genuinely fosters growth, creativity, and resilience in students.
Let’s strive to move beyond SchoolSpeak and re-embrace these words’ original, empowering meanings. Only then can we truly prepare our children for the complexities and challenges of the future, nurturing their innate potential and encouraging them to become innovative, empowered, and resilient individuals.