Seeing the light about 'vision', Teesdale Mercury

Seeing the light about 'vision'

Oct 16, 2007

I visited a school a few days ago but thought I'd strayed into an optician's shop. Facing me on the wall in the ‘visitor-friendly entrance concourse' was a sign headed ‘Vision'. 

How thoughtful, I thought, that the school should want to print everything jumbo size for the visually impaired or elderly, so went over to have a look. 

However, when I got there, it didn't seem to have much to do with glasses or eye tests. It informed me that the school existed to give the children an excellent education and to allow each one to achieve his or her full potential. 

Excuse me? Isn't that what schools are for?  Didn't the staff and parents think that anyway? 

I asked why the confounded thing was dangling there, taking up a space which should have proudly displayed an out-of-date notice about transport for the 2nd X1 to Bishop Auckland or a mouldy print of a famous sea battle.

When I finally ploughed through several minutes of verbiage and goodness knows what, the answer boiled down to the fact that someone had decreed that the school had to have a vision, so a vision the school duly had. 

It had probably taken several meetings of the entire staff and four rain forest trees in paper to arrive at something which the headteacher wrote anyway and which only school inspectors (and peculiar writers for newspapers) ever read. 

Given that 80 per cent of everything the school ever writes about itself is only read by school inspectors and almost all that school inspectors write is only ever read by headteachers, I wondered whose ‘vision' I  was testing.

 They've even got them in prisons, except they call them ‘mission statements'. No, I'm not kidding you, they really have. 

My experience of jails is that the most frequent visions are the ones experienced by inmates whilst under the influence of the various drugs which find their way into the nick in enormous quantities. 

Now, however, everyone must be ‘signed up' to a shared ‘mission'. Most prison officers regard these signs with at best derision and at worst contempt.

 I don't want to be misunderstood. Of course, organisations work better when the people who work there and the clients they work for agree about what the Dickens they're supposed to be doing. 

A Swedish writer I admire said that an organisation is a success when everyone concerned with it says it is.

But ‘mission statement'? A mission is an act of sending someone to do something. One cannot have a mission without being authorised by an outside agency or God.

The nailing-up on a wall of a notice doesn't mean anything, other than that the senior managers of the place have decided to put a notice up.

There is a near-conspiracy between inspectors and inspected in public services that they will use this ghastly, politically correct rubbish instead of clear English. 

It all has a familiar ring to some of us, because it's  been stolen;  from the church. 

 It is now fashionable to see work in the public services as semi-sacred, as a sublime fulfilment of ‘what needs to be done'. 

It is a new, specialised way of talking which raises the status of the people who write this bilge. They all know it doesn't mean anything to anyone outside their magic circle; they all realise that another world, where people speak English, exists outside, but that doesn't make any difference.

And that brings me to the one new usage which truly drives me nuts. 

 Last week, I also went to a meeting where a worthy local politician gave a speech of such unalloyed dullness that he lost his audience within thirty seconds.

By way of a big finish, he roused us from our slumber by telling us that he was ‘passionate' about what he had said. 

I watched him closely. He didn't look or sound any different from usual. The suit was the same, the drone was the same, his hand mannerisms were the same, the subject slightly different but, hell, who could tell?  But he said he was ‘passionate'. 

His chest did not heave, his eyeballs did not rotate in opposite directions, his ears were not, as far as I was aware, emitting much steam.  But he was passionate. 

I pity his poor wife when he tells her that he loves her passionately, because she'd only have his word for it. Presumably he was passionate about the North East as well. 

Like most of you, I like living in the North East. I want the place I live in to be pleasant and I want taxes to fall, but not passionately.  After all, it is England.

So please, let us leave visions for the spiritually overheated, mission statements for the 12 Apostles and passion for the bedroom.

First published in the Mercury October 10