This text discusses some aspects of the pedagogical discourse of the National Curricular Directives, emphasizing how pedagogical jargon and the recourse to consecrated expressions and educational slogans cloud the specificity of the educational task in school institutions and ignore the concrete challenges to teaching activities in these institutions. The analyses center on the ideal of "developing critical competency", seen as the objective of the process of schooling and in the pedagogical ideal of "inter disciplinarity" taking them as examples typical of this type of discourse.