Dialogue: Look it up in the dictionary, Trev

Sorry to go on about jargon and the Education Review Office again this week but I'm dismayed to find that the Minister of Education, Trevor Mallard, also has no understanding of what jargon is and has no intention of attacking its widespread use within the education system.

This week I received a letter from the minister in which he says he supports ERO head Judith Aitken's efforts to simplify the language of the office's reports as far as possible without losing essential messages. They seem to think this is a Herculean task.

Trouble is, he still doesn't get the point that the jargon is not just a minor impediment to ERO's work but renders the organisation dysfunctional. And, worse, he ends his note with: "It is a pity you did not print her [Judith Aitken's] response in full in your subsequent column; it loses a lot in selective editing and editorial!"

Note the childish gotcha exclamation mark at the end.

What he implies is that one paragraph in Aitken's letter was a coup de grace to my argument. She wrote: "Given some of the phrases in your article you are clearly sure of your own audience. Your erudite readers will understand phrases like 'the devolution of the control of schools into separate units under the brooding, occluded eye of the ERO and the failure of a health system that is the pure ideological construct of economic rationalists'."

Now I didn't quote that (or some other stuff) from Aitken's letters in earlier articles because it's irrelevant. There's not a trace of jargon in those phrases, just the need to have a vocabulary of average Herald readers' stretch, which is clearly beyond Ms Aitken and the minister. So God defend New Zealand and its education system is what I say.

I'd like to ask the minister if he'd try the same test I offered Ms Aitken two weeks ago, and to which she hasn't responded. Read the following sclerotic (okay, look it up, Trev) paragraph, which she says is a kind of shorthand: "Where appropriate, staff could consider differentiating curriculum objectives and learning outcomes over more than one curriculum level. Given the wide range of abilities and needs of students within each class, it is important to recognise that not all students will necessarily be working at the same curriculum level in each essential learning area. More consistent differentiation of leaning objectives would help teachers to refine their teaching programmes to meet the diverse needs of students in each class."

Does that mean: Students within each class may have different learning abilities. Staff should try to adapt their teaching programmes to meet the needs of individuals? Or have I missed some essential messages.

If the minister thinks I am a lone voice in this matter, I suggest he should offer immunity from ostracism (that's under O about halfway through your dictionary, Trev) to teachers and trustees and ask them honestly what they think of the language in the reports. Not a day goes by without my receiving at least one letter from a disaffected educationist.

Speaking of correspondence, I was sent this week a document written by a professor at the University of Waikato Law School which contained this among other grandiloquent thoughts: "In individual terms, the consequence of detraditionalisation is that the self and identity may be constructed through conscious and deliberate narratives for understanding and reconstituting one's ascribed and achieved identity." The trajectory of that sentence is the same as that of the famous phoo-phoo bird which flew in ever-decreasing circles until it disappeared up ... You remember.

Have you noticed that everyone believes in freedom of speech for those they agree with but not for others? Those who disagree are fomenting trouble.

Thus Tariana Turia offered an opinion about post-colonial traumatic stress disorder that seemed quite reasonable to me, even if I don't wholly accept it.

But most of those who don't agree consider she was stirring up racial hatred, probably among the bigots, and wanted to shut her up. And as for holocaust, let's decently leave the word with a capital H to the Jews and allow the rest of us to use it with a small h in its literal sense of great loss of life and destruction by fire.

Then the gay community, which fought for years to express its minority opinions and to have what it considered unfair laws repealed, now wants to gag Christians from expressing their opinions about gays in a video.What shameful arrogance.

Finally, the media keep reporting that Helen Clark is angry or furious about some unkind rub of fate or another, but she should return from the United Nations in a happier frame of mind after a few days laughing at that ridiculous little Aussie battler, John Howard.