Have you been to the gym today? Perhaps you’ve done some DIY, caught up with some study, or read that non-fiction book that has sat beside your bed for months. If you are a school leader, your mind may be turning to the governors’ meeting next week when you will be asked for an update on how the school is improving.
Whether self-improvement, home improvement, or continuous organisational improvement, we don’t seem to be able to hide from the belief that things should only get better.
And yet, improvement is a modern concept, forged in 15th century agriculture from the Anglo-French ‘enprowment‘, meaning ‘profitable use’ (originally of land). Archeologist Sarah Tarlow points out that the concept is so familiar and endemic in modern culture that it is difficult to imagine a time before it existed; before this particular term of betterment was coined. In the 17th century, the metaphoric range of the word expanded to become a shorthand for the ‘civilising process’. Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in driving the ideology of improvement, claiming that ‘Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement and success have no meaning’. Frederick Nietzsche bit back, calling the drive for improvement ‘a false and self-serving sense of human superiority over nature’.
In the 20th century, improvement metaphors spread further, thanks to the cultural movements of individualism and consumerism, to be applied to individual betterment, rising material living conditions, business philosophy, and economic growth. In the late 20th century, the ideological wave finally reached the shores of education and the ‘school improvement’ movement began in earnest.
Now that we understand the etymology of the word, let’s turn to its morphology.
The verb improve means ‘to (cause something to) get better’. The suffix ment (as in improvement) turns the verb into a noun, its addition meaning ‘the action/process or the consequent state’. Improvement is therefore either the act of making something better or the consequence of doing so. The morphology reveals something important about the word in that its meaning contains an implicit assumption that the state of something has changed; there is a before and an after. This also implies that there is an entity whose state has changed and an axis along which that change has occurred (from worse to better). Coupled with the meaning of the verb, which references a causal agent in this change, we have the following salient features on the term:
- There is a two dimensional (linear) axis along which betterment occurs.
- There is an entity (object) which moves from one resting state to another.
- There is an agent causing the change of state along the betterment axis.
All very nerdy, but why does any of this matter?
It matters because our language reveals our thinking. Our choice of words is not accidental, but neither is it entirely a conscious process. Taking a moment to consider what our choice of words might reveal about how we think about the world can be illuminating.
Like Nietzsche, I am not entirely comfortable with the ideology of improvement, particularly when it is applied to schools (although I’m not sure Nietzsche was bothered by that application). It is not that I think schools should not improve – I too am trapped by the zeitgeist! It is just that the language of school improvement reveals some narrow thinking about betterment that should concern us.
I will try to explain through my limited grasp of linguistics.
Consider the statement ‘The school has improved’. Does it strike you as odd? I suspect it doesn’t, but I worry that it should.
Our instant response should really be to ask ‘in what way?’, yet we don’t. We act as if the sentence makes absolute sense. Yet if we replace ‘school’ with other objects of improvement, the question leaps to mind:
- The girl has improved
- The park has improved
- The house has improved
The sentence feels much better if we specify the nature of said improvement: the girl has improved her dancing; the park has improved its playground; the house has improved with better insulation.
Why do we allow school improvement off the hook by failing to state in what dimension the betterment has occurred? It is as if there is the school is a single entity which has moved from one state to another along a single axis of improvement. It is better in its entirety. Everything at a more granular level is beyond our view or interest.
The linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Stuff of Thought describes this phenomenon thus: ‘When the mind conceptualises an entity in a location or in motion, it tends to ignore the internal geometry of the object and treat it as a dimensionless point or featureless blob‘ (emphasis mine).
In the school improvement world, ‘the school’ becomes a featureless blob when we talk of schools ‘improving’ or ‘declining’ as if they are one thing and as if they move along one continuum. It is this semantic sleight of hand that makes single-term Ofsted grades appear rational, that allows us to say that one school is better than another, and that allows us to create a simplistic discourse around school improvement.
Now let’s turn to the suffix ‘ment’, which implies a change of state. How does this limit our thinking?
Change-of-state is a particular form of betterment. If we change the state of something, it looks different to how it was before in fundamental ways. We can identify betterment verbs that suggest a change of state as they can often have the suffix ‘ment’ added: development, reinforcement, refinement, enrichment. However, we should not exclude other change-of-state verbs that lock in this meaning in other ways, such as transform, where the word is constructed from others meaning ‘across’ and ‘shape’ – literally to change shape. Transforming schools is almost as popular as improving them, whilst suggesting a more fundamental and radical change. Transformational leadership is the bastard child of shape-shifting betterment verbs, bringing a bold, machismo to efforts to improve schools.
If there are other shape-shifting betterment terms, why do we so frequently use improvement rather than the alternatives. It may be because improvement leans towards the end-result of change rather than the process. Take the term development, the ‘softer’ alternative to improvement. We might say that a school is improved (version 2.0) but we tend not to say a school is developed (as in an end state which is better than the previous version), unlike when we talk about ‘developed countries’ where we clearly mean the state the country is in after being developed. For this reason, it feels more grammatically correct to say the school has developed (i.e. it has been through a process). School improvement takes a school from state A to state B (disregarding the journey in between), whereas school development is a continuum along which the school moves.
What our choice of words tells us is that we prefer to think of schools getting better by moving from one state to another. Again, a transformation.
But there are betterment metaphors that resist the change-of-state meaning entirely. For instance, there are shaping metaphors (mould, shape, adapt), precision metaphors (calibrate, fine tune, tighten), enhancement metaphors (polish, beautify), and structural metaphors (strengthen, build, extend). There is a reason we don’t pursue school calibratement. We are not changing the state of the entity, merely enabling it to perform with greater precision. Similarly, we might enhance what we have or add to what is already there. These can all be improvements, if we focus on the process meaning of the suffix, but they aren’t concerned with a fundamental shift of form.
Furthermore, the above alternative betterment metaphors are often specific about the axis of change. They look beyond the featureless blob and identify what it is that is getting better. Cultures can be shaped, systems fine tuned, presentations polished, relationships strengthened, trust built, judgement calibrated, and participation extended. We only invoke these terms when we get into the nitty gritty of making schools better and which we choose to use reflects our values and priorities. If we listen to the language people use we can tell a lot about what is important to them.
But there is a class of betterment verbs that are different from all of the above as they have no causal agent. These include evolve, flourish, yield, and prosper. We can’t evolve a school, or flourish it. There is no-one acting with intention. This is schools getting better through the invisible hand or even as a consequence of people stepping back to let things unfold. We tend not to talk about things getting better in this way because it is the relinquishment of control, the admission that good things can happen without us, the antithesis of leadership as it is commonly conceived. Yet things can get better without human intervention, or despite it. As Nietzsche noted, to assume .our superiority over nature is somewhat arrogant.
The school improvement narrative can distract us from the internal geometry of schools and the variety of ways things can get better. In its focus on the featureless blob of the school and a singular axis along which this entity can travel, we risk losing sight of the multiplicity of ways goodness can be defined. We imagine that things won’t get better without our interventionist hand. We doom ourselves to continually form and reform, never happy with what we have now.
For the most part, our language reveals our thinking. But it might also shape our thinking if we let it. We could only see red until we coined the term pink, after which these colours will forever remain separate. We should choose our words wisely and weigh them carefully lest we find ourselves in a conceptual trap, unable to imagine a better way to betterment.
Credit to Steven Pinker for teaching me more about verbs. I recommend the book mentioned above.
Matthew Evans 