"IT'S simply a case of engendering a mutual co-existence where synergistic innovators survive."

Got that?

If so, here's another bit of modernspeak to consider: "I want to give employees responsibility for, and ownership of, their own learning. I want managers, many of whom are disengaged, to become pro-active partners in the process."

The first was simply a "suit" addressing a national conference some while ago whose words I noted down for the beauty of their polysyllabic impenetrability.

In the second, I must admit I've cheated. I replaced the original's "pupils" and "parents" with "employees" and "managers" but either version sounds like a business-school mission statement and not at all the sort of thing one expects from a headmaster.

This headmaster, however, has already abandoned teaching individual subjects, followed last week by homework. To fit them for the modern world, pupils are to be responsible for managing their own learning, through across-the-curriculum projects. They will also mark each other's work.

Dr Patrick Hazlewood, headmaster of an 11-18-year-olds' school in Wiltshire, is following a scheme drawn up by the Royal Society of Arts.

It does rather pose the question of what the teachers are meant to do. Create the project frameworks and give advice, I suppose, then act as zoo-keepers while these teenagers "manage their learning" in the inevitably chaotic manner.

Honestly, you couldn't invent it for a science fantasy novel. Readers would laugh, because they are teenagers themselves, or teachers, or parents. They know that the bulk of the age group has about as much chance of managing its own learning as it has of nailing jelly to the ceiling.

"Creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school" as many of them do, just getting to a class is about all they can manage, according to reports from the chalkface. Even in more-disciplined generations, even among the grammar school swots, few would have been conscientious and diligent enough to make a success of this loose framework of learning.

It will be doubly hard on those who do want to work and get on, who would organise their projects and submit them on time, and whose parents are "pro-active" and supportive.

Chaos could win, unless these pupils are gathered together in their own classroom and, ooh, shock, horror, that would smack of elitism.

Most of us, if we're honest, will admit we'd have been among the skivers without the framework of a subject timetable and homework which had to be turned in on time. Children - and teenagers - need an organised framework or they're all over the place like spilled mercury.

And I used to regard the RSA, which gave me certificates for shorthand and computer literacy, as the height of practicality.

Ah well, we shall see what happens. Maybe Dr Hazlewood is a head of such charisma and brilliance that his flock will follow his dream. Or maybe not. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if, after a school year or two, the experiment is quietly dropped, but it could be tough luck on the guinea pigs (and their parents).