By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK

The curriculum director explains how they will maximize outcomes by implementing a personalized version of project-based learning to enhance skill attainment. On the other hand, you would rather they simply and directly teach your child the skills and knowledge that are needed in modern life.

A constant stream of new terms are generated in education—daily! It has given rise to the dismissive terms such as edu-babble, educationese and edu-speak. We even hear calls for straight talk in education and the disregard of all “jargon.”

But labeling all new terminology as useless jargon is to dismiss the importance of expanded vocabulary in the march of progress. Examine a dictionary from the Greek and Roman times. It is dramatically smaller than a modern dictionary. And advances in science and other disciplines are dependent upon recognizing more and more distinct entities in our world. New and more precise terminology is necessary.

For instance, an ailment called “consumption” was as dreaded in the 1800s as cancer is today. Consumption was any chest disorder where the lungs were “consumed.” With the modernization of medicine following Pasteur and Koch’s germ theory of the 1870s, consumption was soon re-defined into emphysema, tuberculosis, viral or bacterial pneumonia, a variety of lung cancers, and many other specific problems. The vague term “consumption” was totally replaced by this much larger vocabulary of medically precise terms we use today. Our modern understanding of these distinct diseases requires this vocabulary. These terms are not “jargon” in the sense that they are trivial or irrelevant. These terms are important in advancing the way we think about these ailments and avoiding “snake oil” remedies.

Sometimes we see an arrogant individual spout technical terminology when it is not needed, in an attempt to impress others with his superiority. That is a flaw in the speaker, not in the language.

What is truly difficult is explaining a complex concept to a youngster who has not yet matured to a level to understand the complex terminology. For the very young, we use “germs” rather than viruses or bacteria, but “germs” is not precise. For youngsters with allergic reactions, they may not yet understand the concept of bronchial dilation. And understanding blood vessel dilation and constriction will become important in understanding how fluids can collect in the lungs and how certain medications work to reverse it. Explaining these concepts to young patients is a challenge that physicians, nurses and parents often face. But we cannot use precise language with young children until they have gained enough experiences to understand what these more precise terms mean.

So what about the daily flood of new education terms? Education jargon is often empty jargon, rapidly invented and often soon forgotten. Sadly, education concepts spring up from a new technology application or someone’s offhand variation from standard teaching. The term often comes from nowhere because education, unlike science, has no paradigm to build on.

Science is built on a long-standing body of knowledge, the science “paradigm,” and new terms fit with and further refine this large body of knowledge. Most education jargon terminology does not build such a body of knowledge. Some pseudo-concepts such as student “learning styles” have lasted more than a few years without any evidence they exist, and recently have been de-bunked with actual research.

American education since the 1970s is a history of short-term reforms that are unlinked to each other, jumping from fad to fad. —Innovation good. —Tradition bad.

So the next time you encounter an educationist proposing to use a data-driven methodology to gain actionable feedback to develop an omni-channel approach to student engagement in order to achieve post-high school readiness, you might consider another new term: “miseducation.”