How productive was my pedagogies.(Education)

"WHEN I USE a word it means whatever I want it to mean!" the Queen of Hearts famously declared in Alice in Wonderland. Worryingly, it seems Education Queensland is dealing cards from the same pack, much to the bewilderment of anyone who tries to read its impenetrable policy documents!

The jewel in the crown of Education Queensland's much vaunted new-directions documents is what it is pleased to call "The Productive Pedagogies". Such a phrase immediately sets off alarm bells for anyone who values plain English but it also arouses the same astonishment we might feel if a brontosaurus suddenly walked past our window. And that's exactly what the word pedagogies is--a long-extinct dinosaur brought back to life as a horrible mutation. I've only come across the word twice in my entire life, once in Dickens and once from my Latin teacher (who was also fond of words like "defenestration"--usually as a threat) so it was hardly a household word even in my twentieth-century schooldays. The Australian National Dictionary, which cites the first appearance of a word in our literature, has no record of it ever being used.

Pedagogies! What does it actually mean? Well, nothing actually, because there's no such word--the people at Education Queensland have made it up. The word is actually pedagogy, which means the art or science of teaching, and pedagogues are teachers. The Australian Oxford Dictionary warns that it is archaic (that is, virtually extinct) but Education Queensland is nonetheless pleased to choose this dinosaur word to lead it into the twenty-first century! Dictionaries also warn us that its use is usually contemptuous, derogatory or pejorative, implying pedantry.

When we look up pedantry we find it describes a "dull, narrow-minded teacher", someone who "displays knowledge in an unnecessary or tiresome way or puts great stress on minor points of learning--tediously learned--having little understanding or experience of practical affairs". Is this the image Queensland wants to project of its teachers? But as if all that doesn't demonstrate the disaster of this word, Education Queensland then afflicts us with its horrible mutation of this dinosaur and renders it as "pedagogies". "Productive pedagogues" we could perhaps understand; "productive pedagogy" makes sense; but no dictionary, nor Fowler's Modern English Usage, offers the form of the word as pedagogies.

Anyway, having exhumed this dinosaur and brought it back to life like Frankenstein's monster Education Queensland then aggravates the offence by saying, "Productive pedagogies is a balanced framework ..." This extremely elementary grammatical error of plural noun and singular verb is hardly what we should expect from Queensland's ultimate educational authority. Unfortunately it seems completely baffled by its own weird word because elsewhere, on its website, it explains that "Productive pedagogies are effective pedagogy". Although this at least achieves apparent agreement of noun and verb it then commits the further offence of defining one obscure word with another form of the same word!

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