Loud

Even the language we use to speak about schooling suggests a different agenda from the one we rhetorically claim. When we speak of teachers being “burned out,” we are unconsciously imagining them as appliances, one more or less like the other. There is another description we could have used; we could have said that teachers are exhausted. Both may be true. Teachers who are treated like appliances may be burned out, and those who are treated like human beings may be exhausted. We need to make that distinction. Again, when we talk of “delivering instruction,” of “measuring outcomes,” we are using language for inanimate objects, and we betray our lack of respect for the recipients of that schooling.