Recently, in the course of my reading, I came across a cross a quote warning that because educators spend so much time around young people, it is all too easy for them to unconsciously absorb the language of the schoolyard. This immediately got me thinking about some of the most popular education slogans denigrating explicit instruction and practice, and more specifically, about their rhetorical features.
To take what are probably the most famous examples:
- Not a sage on the stage, but a guide on the side
- Chalk n’ talk
- Drill n’ kill
- Plug n’ chug
In the past, the very superficiality of these catchphrases had prevented me from even bothering to consider their linguistic properties. But once I started looking at them from that angle, I was finally able to name what had so long troubled me about them, as well as to understand how they derive their very insidiousness.
So, as can easily be observed, these slogans have two primary features:
- They consist entirely of one-syllable words
- They rhyme
These qualities are, of course, what makes them so easy to remember, repeat, and ultimately internalize; they’re basically marketing jingles, the way they’re designed to stick in the mind.
What also makes them easy to digest, and what makes them such ideal propaganda, of course, is that they paint the practice of direct teaching in elementary-level, black-and white terms that require no real reflection or, to use current terminology, “higher order thinking skills.”
The embrace of such playground-like taunts is not only highly ironic for a profession that claims to promote “critical thinking” (itself now rendered a largely meaningless buzzword), but it also implies a worldview in which such considerations are irrelevant because we know what real learning is and you don’t, nyah-nyah-nyah-boo-boo.
There is really something nursery rhyme- or picture-book-text-esque about their rhythm, so directly do they evoke a type of language appealing to children barely past toddlerhood.
With apologies to Dr. Suess:
I do not do talk, talk, talk
I do not do chalk, chalk, chalk
Chalk and talk I’ll never do
Chalk and talk, it’s done and through
I don’t drill them in the yards
I don’t drill them with flashcards
I don’t drill them, no I don’t
I don’t drill them, no I won’t
I write this in jest, of course (and in case, you’re wondering, I wrote it, not an LLM), but in all seriousness, when one listens to people who genuinely believe that non-teaching constitutes real education, one can perceive echoes of an unrestrained, almost vicious glee at the opportunity to rip traditional notions of practice and the acquisition of systematic knowledge to shreds.
One suspects that it is the revenge of people who are still positively foaming with resentment at being told what they had to learn by some mean, nasty old teacher, and who at some level entered the teaching profession with the goal of undermining it.
Educators in the United States have long bemoaned the lack of status and seriousness accorded to their profession, but many fail to see that embracing this type of infantilized, and infantilizing, language does nothing to improve that situation.
To be clear: there are many wonderful, dedicated, fabulous teachers who understand that instructing students directly and building factual knowledge is in no way at odds with helping them become independent thinkers. I am not talking about them. I am also aware that the language I discuss here is often pushed by education professors and administrators rather than current classroom teachers.
I am also not arguing that teachers should do nothing but stand and “drone on” while students attempt to mechanically record every word (a favorite straw man argument); the best explicit instruction tends to be highly engaging and interactive.
What I am saying is that an education system that fails to distinguish between the language of children and the language of adults, and that is built on encouraging the the former to adopt the latter, is not one that is in any position to provide a meaningful education at all.
Yes, good teachers need to be able to empathize with children and to imagine the world from their perspective, but it is dangerous for them to get stuck there. Holding children responsible for teaching one another a subject to which they have only just been introduced is bad enough; it is an even greater problem if the teacher adopts the mindset of a child, too.
A teacher is an authority figure, no matter how much she wishes or pretends not to be; and a child who is deprived of crucial knowledge because she has been inculcated with the idea that explaining it clearly and directly is A Very Bad Thing, is just as much at her mercy as if she were to rap his knuckles with a birch stick and make him stand in a corner wearing a dunce cap.
Words can be both a reflection and a driver of belief, and regardless of what teachers initially believe about the profession, the more they hear stock phrases repeated—first in ed school and then though endless required professional development sessions—and the more their advancement depends on reiterating them, the more they risk coming to accept those thoughts as their own. The ones who don’t buy them are increasingly driven out, leaving a larger and larger class of true believers in their stead. And such believers will be more than happy to cede their instructional place to an chatbot because, after all, they were never anything more than a guide on the side.