Avoiding psychobabble in post-secondary eduation

The process of getting my Bachelor's degree taught me many lessons - few of which, unfortunately, had anything to do with what I wanted to learn. Perhaps the biggest of these lessons was the importance of recognizing jargon and various forms of babble in instructional manuals, textbooks and most importantly in the lectures given by my instructors. As a student of the arts, the jargon I was most afflicted with was psychobabble, and the amount of it that I encountered during my 4 years was astounding. I wanted to take a moment now to write down my experiences and struggles with dealing with this non-sense, and hopefully forewarn future students of this serious problem with our education system.

In simple terms, psychobabble, similarly to technobabble, is a way of speaking that sounds intelligent and complicated, but contains no actual importance or value behind what is being said. Usually this way of speaking (or writing) is very esoteric - in other words, it uses words that are loosely defined, or very specific to the subject that they are describing, and more often than not, these words contain double-meanings that allow them to be interpreted in different ways. A great example of technobabble, which is the scientific counterpart to philosophy's psychobabble is the Turbo-Encabulator - a fake instrument with an extremely complicated functionality involving funny terms such as 'dingle-arm' and 'lunar wane-shaft'. When used in a comedic skit on YouTube or as just about on every Star Trek episode, technobabble can be really quite funny. However, when this garbage is discussed in a classroom setting as a serious form of discourse - I believe it's a serious issue and it devalues the entire discussion.



The problem is that when students come out of a fairly simple-minded, high school classroom entering this environment can be very daunting and misleading. As a 1st year student in university, I was naturally inclined to take anything our instructors told us at face value. After-all, they were put into those positions of power and authority for a reason. The big lecture halls, auditoriums, podiums and (often) aged and (less often) wise teachers gave me a feeling of importance. Everything about this environment made me think that, "these people look, act and talk important - and I should listen and try to understand what they're talking about." By the 3rd year, I questioned (and usually rejected) just about every lecture and every reading we were assigned, in just about every one of my classes. In fact by the time I was in my last year I didn't read any of the assigned readings because I was completely overwhelmed and fed-up with the psychobabble contained there in. Now, it's quite possible this attitude made me miss out on some interesting works of literature, but I began to focus more on the classroom discussions than on the readings themselves. I was more interested in being able to participate in an open discussion about the topics, than having to read one opinion on the subject by one ego-tripping writer.

I turned my attention to the opinions of students and instructors during seminars where we discussed the readings, and what I found was truly disappointing. The majority of students refused to participate in the discussions entirely - and I strongly believe that this wasn't because of their character, but because they were afraid of the language used in these discussions. Certainly, every person in that classroom had an opinion on the topics we were discussing (they were usually really fascinating and complicated subjects). The topics were curious, the questions asked were insightful but the only people who participated in the discussions were either people fluent in psychobabble, the instructors, or me. There were of course extremely rare cases who simply used very complicated language to express their intelligent ideas, but the majority of people had really weak, unintelligent, and vague remarks.

Most upsetting of all was that a lot of instructors (although, not all) would reward and encourage this form of discussion as if it was the crux of the entire seminar. It seemed to me like the more vague and psychoanalytical you were able to sound - the more interesting you were to the rest of the students and teachers, and this to me is completely baffling and unacceptable. If I had only one criticism of the entire education system it would be the blatant bombardment of psychobabble that misleads students into believing that using complicated esoteric language renders their opinion and points more valid. We need to stop perpetuating this misconduct and I believe the first step in achieving this is to simply stop using psychobabble in your own discourse.

So please, young post-secondary students of 2010 - have an actual interesting point of view and a simple way of expressing it instead of trying to sound intelligent. Most of us are pretty stupid, and that's okay. What makes people interesting isn't how they speak - it's what they say and what they mean by it.

Megapolitan is now available online

My grad film Megapolitan is now available in full online at: http://www.megapolitanmovie.com/

Let me know what you think.

My short film Megapolitan is completed

After a long year (and a half) of production, my 3D animated short film Megapolitan will be premiering at the 48 Short Films show tomorrow night. I hope to see you all there. For more information about the show visit: http://www.48shortfilms.com/

The film will be available for screening in full on the official website on June 1.

For more information about the film visit: http://www.megapolitanmovie.com/

Globex Designs, Inc. Relaunch

This week my web and media design company launched a brand new website at http://www.globexdesigns.com/

We've worked hard on making many improvements to portfolio and products section of our website and we're very excited about the new changes to the client center which allow our customers to easily and quickly manage orders and look through their project requests online.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Megapolitan Movie

Work has begun on my upcoming graduating film - Megapolitan.

I've launched a new website at: http://www.megapolitanmovie.com/

In the coming months, I'll be releasing more information about the movie as production gets under way.

Evgueni Speaks!

I have been working hard to finish the new http:///www.naverniouk.com website in time for the new year.

It's been a lot of fun, and hopefully you enjoy all the various work I'll be putting up on the site.

Over the last few months I've done quite a bit of various design and school work, so there's a lot of images to be posted up.