The Purpose of Educational Jargon

“Peter’s well-known principle was obviously discovered by a man who knew nothing at all about schools. It just isn’t true that the people who can actually do their jobs get promoted until they find themselves, at last and forever, in the jobs they can’t do. This is because the most difficult and demanding jobs in education are what industry calls “entry-level positions”, teaching in classrooms. That’s the bottom rung of the school ladder, and there are many people who just can’t do that work.

“Partly because so many have incompetence thrust upon them, and party because so many are born to incompetence, in every faculty there will be people who just can’t handle the entry-level position. In industry, or even in a fast-food restaurant, they would be washed out; but we don’t do that kind of thing in the schools. In the schools, those who cannot do the work at the lowest rank are simply promoted into higher ranks. Weirdly enough, given the nature of the educational enterprise, this makes perfect sense.

“In those realms where the Peter Principle prevails, it is often true that higher rank and higher pay do go along with harder work. In the schools, where there is no harder work than teaching in a classroom, exactly the opposite is true. In fact, it is not at all absurd to imagine a perfectly-splendid school in which there are only teachers and one clever and industrious handyman who can also type. On the other hand, think for a moment about the school toward which, as all the statistics suggest, we might be moving, a school made up almost entirely of administrators and their own support services.

“In such a school, we would see clearly what we now can see only darkly through the frosted glass of governmental dogma: that almost all of the work done by those above the rank of teacher is contrived so that there may be more workers. Thus it is that so much of the administrative work done in schools is intended not to do work, as a physicist would use the term, but to occupy time and justify the existence of some administrative post. It turns out, not surprisingly therefore, that the mindless and inflated jargon, superbly suited to the darkening of logic and the interminable belaboring of the obvious, is exactly the language that an educationistic administrator needs in order to conceal the fact that the work he does simply doesn’t need doing.”

(Excerpted with permission from The Graves of Academe, by Richard Mitchell, 1980)

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