A lexicon for decoding the language that makes cruelty sound like care.
British Columbia’s education system speaks in a vocabulary of tenderness that conceals its machinery of exclusion. Policies shimmer with words like inclusion, collaboration, and safety, each one polished smooth through repetition until its original meaning dissolves. Beneath the surface lies a structure of governance that relies on euphemism as both armour and anaesthetic.
This dictionary restores the edges of those words. It translates civility back into truth, recognising that harm survives through tone, and that every bureaucratic synonym for care is also a strategy for control.
Inclusive education
A phrase that promises belonging while describing proximity without support. It sells access as ideology while preserving scarcity as practice. The disabled child’s presence is used as proof of progress even as their exclusion is quietly reclassified as “accommodation limits.”
Safety plan
A containment document that places responsibility for risk on the very child most endangered by neglect. It enshrines the illusion of protection by cordoning off those who trigger institutional discomfort. Safety becomes synonymous with silence.
Complex needs
A polite declaration that a student exceeds what the system will fund. It dresses refusal in the language of compassion, implying tragedy rather than policy choice. Complexity becomes the rationale for abandonment.
Behaviour support
A ritual of correction that disguises control as kindness. It punishes distress for speaking its own name and rewards the performance of composure. Every sticker is an invoice for obedience.
Alternate setting
A euphemism for exile. It removes children from public visibility while preserving the illusion of inclusion through bureaucratic paperwork. The system stays clean because the harm is outsourced to distance.
Waitlist
A holding pattern where rights wither into endurance tests. It transforms urgency into patience and families into administrators of their own despair. Time itself becomes the instrument of governance.
Parent collaboration
A demand that families perform the labour of professionals under the banner of partnership. It praises resilience while consuming it, applauds advocacy while penalising persistence, and frames exhaustion as love.
Restorative practice
A ritual of reconciliation that heals the institution rather than the injured. It assumes that repair occurs through calm conversation, that understanding requires speech, and that everyone can meet in the same emotional language at the same time. The child expected to move from dysregulation into reflective dialogue is treated as a moral lesson rather than a human being in recovery. True restoration would offer multiple forms of participation—written, asynchronous, sensory, or silent—each one honouring the body’s pace of safety.
Historic investment
A phrase engineered for press releases rather than classrooms. It converts marginal increases into moral triumphs, ensuring that austerity always arrives wearing the smile of improvement.
Reasonable effort
The soft ceiling of public accountability. It marks the line between what is owed and what is offered, transforming insufficiency into virtue and making complacency sound humane.
Closing reflection
The language of education in this province is a mirror polished by denial. Each euphemism reflects back an image of benevolence so convincing that even those inside the system come to believe it. Yet every phrase decoded here reveals a deeper truth: scarcity is policy, delay is design, and civility is the camouflage of harm. To speak plainly is to resist.
