THE PETERITE Vol. XLIV
OCTOBER, 1952
No. 331
EDITORIAL The growing encroachment of jargon into all branches of human activity is a phenomenon with which we are only too familiar. We have all heard of the "Rodent Operative". Whether he catches or destroys more rats than his predecessor, the rat-catcher, or whether the dignity of his calling is in any way enhanced by this appellation is open to doubt. But he is a good example of the modern refusal to call a spade a' spade and the somewhat pathetic belief that by circumlocution and the invention of a pseudo-technical terminology we somehow at once become experts endowed with the wisdom of prolonged and exacting research. Indeed "research" is the key to everything in our enlightened age. There is no problem of everyday life and no difficulty in our human relationships which does not require for its solution the creation of a committee or society to research into it. And, once in being, the committee or society proceeds immediately to cloak its activities in a bogus scientific vocabulary perfectly designed to bemuse the general public. That educational matters have long since fallen victim to this prevailing trend is well known to anyone who has to read Ministry of Education pamphlets or Local Authority pronouncements. Someone at last has had the courage to protest against it. In the course of some correspondence in "The Times" the Goldsmith Professor of English at the University of Oxford admitted that he had been unable to understand much of a letter written by the Director of the National Foundation for Educational Research. The letter was on the subject of the examination for entry to Grammar Schools, or, as the Director called it, "contemporary 11+ selection technique". A Professor of English presumably understands English; and if he is foxed by the expert's ways of expressing himself what of the ordinary citizen, who, we imagine, is not uninterested in education? Whether the modern "intelligence test" is the best method of selecting pupils for the Grammar Schools (the subject of "The Times" correspondence) is a question on which we will not offer an opinion. But we doubt very much whether the problem is brought any nearer to solution by calling a qualifying examination "contemporary 11+ selection technique". 1
