Practices of language teaching and learning are embedded in a larger set of adult activities. This larger set is viewed not in educational terms, but as direct contributions to the economy, as work, contributions shaped at every step by a specific type of pedagogic supervision that we choose to call editoriality. Generative grammar, the flagship articulation of the discipline of linguistics, has failed to rigorously incorporate editoriality in its account of language. In its anxiety to develop a natural science approach to the study of spoken language, generative grammar has instead naïvely accorded the status of a natural phenomenon to the notion of native speakers of a language, in whose minds the language is supposedly situated. Arguing against such an ‘ibu’-focused approach (ibu is Indonesian for mother) to the task of characterising human language, this chapter shows how an IPU-focused alternative (IPU is short for ‘impeccably proficient users’ of a language) that takes editoriality into account can help improve both theory and practice at the education-language interface, without abandoning the positive contributions of generative grammar.