By Area 13 Director Jerry Cammarata Cammarata is a member of the New York City Board of Education. This article originally appeared in the February 2000 issue of The American School Board Journal . Reprinted with permission.
All social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering .
Those wise words are often repeated by Msgr. William Smith, a New York-based Catholic theologian and bioethicist. George Orwell made the same point a half-century ago, when he invented Newspeak for his book 1984. Of late, this meta-language has been used to make it nearly impossible to set clear, enforceable standards for education. Apparently, it's irrelevant whether a child knows when the Civil War started, or can compose a grammatically correct and tightly structured paragraph, or can spell chrysanthemum, or can calculate the area of a triangle, or can even sit still for 15 minutes at a time.