Job Discussion Forums

[desultude]

He kind of does look like the Wizard of Oz, though! And he speaks really slowly, with appropriate gravitas.

[johnslat]

Dear desultude,

All we geezers speak really slowly (and with appropriate gravitas.) It goes with the territory, so to speak. The cobwebs accumulate up there in the brain housing group.. But don't let that fool you young whippersnappers (hmm, is that redundant; can there be an "old whippersnapper"?) we're as sharp as the proverbial tack (and sometimes we're pretty tacky, to boot.)
Regards,
John

[desultude]

Okay, John, did you look at one of the videos? What do you think?

[johnslat]

Dear desultude,

I did (look at the videos), and, as I mentioned, the ideas expressed are ones I tend to agree with, but they are also very similar to those written about by Alvin Toffler, back in 1970 (and before that, by many other education writers ever since the Industrial Revolution.)

So, I wouldn't call them "revolutionary," but since no one (or at least no one is a position of enough power to make a difference) seems to be listening, I certainly can't see any harm in being another "voice crying in the wilderness."

Regards,
John

[Neil McBeath]

Dear Desultude,

"educationalist" (noun) an expert in education.

Source, Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners - New Edition (2007).

This is, incidentally, the dictionary that we use on the Intensive Programme at SQU.

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English - New Edition 1992 glosses the word as "a specialist in education."

See what you find out when you take a Lexicography Module on an advanced degree ciourse, and when you believe that teaching EFL is actually a career choice and not, as someone recently stated, "a gig"?

[boundforsaudi]

Ha. Those learner's dictionaries are a hoot. Ought to try a grown-up dictionary sometime:

educationist definition

edu�ca�tion�ist (-s̸hən ist)

noun
an educator; esp., an authority on educational theory: often a disparaging term with varying connotations of inflexibility, intellectual limitations, or bias against traditionalism
also educationalist ed′u�ca′�tion�al�ist (-s̸hə nə list)

Webster's New World College Dictionary Copyright � 2009 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio.
Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

[Neil McBeath]

Boundforsaudi,

Thank you so much.

Yet another divergence between British and American English.

The British usage conveys no derogatory implicature, whereas the American variant may have disparaging connotations.

Please notice, however, that there is no suggestion that the word does not exist, or that it is a recent coinage.

[boundforsaudi]

"The ideologues of educationism (fortunately for us, if we will pay thoughtful attention) have so thoroughly given themselves to their disdain of intellectual discipline that they always, and always inadvertently, reveal some truth when they pretend to do the work of the mind in writing."

From The Graves of Academe.

http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/graves-of-academe/index.html

Webster is just calling a spade a spade. From the very beginning, educationists have had a leftist agenda, especially in Britain:

http://www.shpltd.co.uk/mayer-fatal-mutilations.pdf