In Boingboing there was an excellent 
interview with George Lakoff (and another piece here) in which he describes how progressives have allowed conservatives to frame the language used in political life. By framing issues in conservative terms, conservative ideas appear commonsensical. This is a phenomenon I've observed frequently in educational discourse related to transmissionist and constructivist theories of learning. When the teacher says, "Here's what you need to know", the implication is "and it doesn't matter whether you understand what this means or not". Once you become sensitized to the issues, you begin to see these patterns throughout the entire range of educational discourse: knowledge is represented primarily as a set of discrete facts, teaching means to present the facts in a well-organized structure to facilitate easy retrieval on tests, and tests tell you whether students "know" something or not -- it makes a nice, round circle. It's possible to reframe the dialog, but it requires a lot of time and patience: "When you say, 'I taught them something, but it didn't sink in ', what do you mean, exactly?'"