Guardian

Language on parade

MY first encounter with that word was in the title of Paulo Freire’s very popular book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, long, long ago.  Content with its well-written review, I did bother then to find and read the compact red book whose cover signaled unorthodoxy, because the title was written diagonally atop the cover, instead of horizontally, as is the case with books I had read hitherto.  I am talking about 30 plus years ago.

And, believe me, all these years I did not have the urge to find out the root of the word, “pedagogy,” that is, its etymology, assuming all along that I knew the word, truly. I stress the word, “truly,” because etymology itself comes from the Greek word, etymon, which means “true”   Gosh, nobody who truly wants to learn the labyrinths of language should do a thing like that: Assume that s/he knows what a word means, not knowing that s/he is truly wallowing in ignorance.

My lexical complacency concerning pedagogy was finally broken last week – more than three decades, that is - when one thing led to another, as my mind got working on all that it had absorbed and absolved after I watched President Goodluck Jonathan and his Jang, I beg your pardon, gang, present his Administration’s mid term report on the “Transformation Agenda.”  To be exact, what actually broke my complacency about the word was the characterization of the report by Misan, my bosom friend and alter ego.

Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, May 29, 2013, a visibly infuriated Misan burst into my office, hollering: “Gee, did you see what I saw on NTA International?”  “You mean President Jonathan and his men presenting an account of their stewardship to the Nigerian people?” Oh boy, never have I seen this side of Misan!  “Stewardship, did you say?” he retorted.  “What stewardship?  I hear the president used to be a teacher.  But how could he and his ministers make many viewers endure such a long and painful pedagogic presentation.”

Strong words, indeed!  After trying to calm Misan down, I said to myself, “Not again!  Before I do any other thing today, I must try to find out the root and the meanings of this word, properly, instead of living in a fool’s paradise.”  To the available thesaurus and dictionary I went, immediately, and here is what I now know, for sure.  The word, “pedagogic,” is the adjectival form of “pedagogy,” the noun.  Pedagogy itself has a kin primary noun, “pedagogue,” which comes from a Greek word that combines “child” and “to lead.”  A literal definition of pedagogue, therefore, is “a person who leads a child,” hence, “a teacher.”

There is one connotative definition of pedagogue, though, which I believe will not be well-received in atop the Rock.  It states that a pedagogue is “a person who likes to teach people things, especially because they know more than other people.”  But lest I digress, let me quickly return to the main word, pedagogy — a most noble word, and one that anybody like me, who does what I do for a living, should be hugging all the time, and employ its principles.  It is defined by one dictionary as “the profession or function of a teacher; teaching.”  More technically, pedagogy is “the art or science of teaching; especially, instruction in teaching method.”

Upon this personal enlightenment, I intoned, “Aha, now, I can see where all that talk by President Jonathan comes from!”  The teacher that he was, the president must have decided to resort to the language of the teaching profession when the time came to presenting his report to the people.  For, as we all know, teaching is not complete without examination.  And one thing we all know that teachers do in that regard is setting questions.

However, one thing most people do not know that teachers do with regard to examinations is that they also prepare “marking schemes.”  You see, to ensure that teachers are fair to students in marking their examination scripts, the profession, or, to be more exact, some educational institutions have an orthodox practice of making teachers prepare a marking scheme.  This is a skeleton of the correct answers to the examination question, stipulating what the students are required or expected to provide as answers. Besides, the marking scheme allocates the specific marks for the correct answers. As such, the marking can be used by anybody - an external examiner or an internal moderator - to ensure that the teacher - the internal or original examiner - has been fair in his marking.

After educating myself properly about the etymology and meaning of pedagogy, and given what I know about marking schemes, as a teacher, I started to reflect on the language of the president. Specifically, I reflected on the president’s insistent plea that “those who want to write (about) and assess us” must prepare a “marking scheme.”  But the more I reflected on it, the more I got worried about the president’s language, that is, his invocation of marking scheme.

“What is the logic of this language,” I ruminated, for it is the teacher who sets an examination and prepares a marking scheme, not the external examiner or internal moderator whose duty is to assess how the teacher has marked the scripts.  Certainly, it is not the student. And in this case, who is the person that chooses to assess or criticise the president, analogically speaking?  Is he the teacher, external examiner, internal moderator, or the student?

The more I mulled the president’s usage of marking scheme over, the more logical I found this headline in The Nation of May 31, 2013: “ACN TO JONATHAN: NO NEED FOR MARKING SCHEME.” Anyway, since politics is the sweetest taboo on the language train, the substance of the news story is absolutely of no interest to us.  That is why I jettisoned the original title of today’s LOP, which was overly long and had a political undertone: “Marking Scheme as Pedagogy of the Oppressor.”