Everybody Yada-Yadas the Learning Process

There's a Seinfeld episode called "The Yada Yada" in which George Costanza is dating a woman named Marcy who keeps using the phrase "yada yada" to skip over the key information in the stories she tells:

Marcy: You know, a friend of mine thought she got Legionnaire's disease in the hot tub.

George: Really? What happened?

Marcy: Oh, yada yada yada, just some bad egg salad. I'll be right back. (She gets up)

Jerry: I noticed she's big on the phrase "yada yada."

George: Is "yada yada" bad?

Jerry: No, "yada yada" is good. She's very succinct.

George: She is succinct.

Jerry: Yeah, it's like you're dating USA Today.

I wish this reference were more universally recognized, because one of the mistakes I see writers making most frequently is "yada-yadaing" the story at the heart of their piece, saying something like "The student and I started weekly one-on-one check-ins. After eight weeks, they were passing all their classes." 

Do you see the problem? the author yada-yadaed what actually happened in the one-on-one check ins!

The most egregious example I see of educational yada-yadaing happens when a journalist or politician declares that "all students should be learning [insert skill or set of facts here]." As in "Students need to be taught an ethnic studies curriculum" or "Students need to learn handwriting".

The pediatrician Rachel Pearson highlights a great example of this in an article she wrote for Harpers, "Bedside Manners":
In April 2024, a group of nurses, doctors, and scholars assembled under the aegis of the Global Empathy in Healthcare Network to venture an answer in the form of the Leicester Empathy Declaration, published in the journal Patient Education and Counseling. It is “ethically imperative, and economically advantageous for all healthcare professionals to undertake empathy training,” the authors wrote.

The declaration reads as if the question of whether empathy is teachable—and if so, how—is largely settled: all sites of medical training should organize lessons in “efficient, evidence-based methods for practitioners to deliver consistently high levels of empathy,” it claims, without explaining what these methods are. But can empathy really be systematically produced? Or will attempts to do so ultimately cheapen the very thing they seek to create?

As Pearson observes, this is an especially egregious instance of yada-yadaing, since it's about "empathy, which is a hard skill to pin down (if "skill" is even the right category). But I think people also need to stop using the structure of "it's ethically imperative for X to undertake training in Y" even for more straightforward skills like spelling, because the process by which a person gets another person to learn something that they want that person to learn is not straightforward, nor is it straightforwardly replicable. 

Of course, it is replicable to some extent, or there would be no point in "learning to teach." But the idea that it makes sense to say "everyone should learn X" and then move on with your life is absurd.