Words without meaning

Luke Slattery
MATP
1,597 words
23 July 2005
The Australian
1 - All-round Country
31
English
Copyright 2005 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Postmodern literary theory has infiltrated our schools at the expense of comprehension and expression, writes Luke Slattery

IN John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, by children's author Jenny Wagner, a pet pooch tries to keep the needy neighbourhood cat from Rose, his doting owner, for not altogether noble motives.

The award-winning picture book, illustrated by Ron Brooks, is often used to open up classroom discussions about friendship and its excesses: jealousy and possessiveness.

But in From Picture Book to Literary Theory, a booklet addressed to teachers pushing the barrow of postmodern theory in the classroom, edited by academics JohnStephens, Ken Watson and Judith Parker, John Brown demonstrates to students the way in which we are socially constructed as readers.

The academics also use Changes, an illustrated children's book by Anthony Brown, to teach school students the poststructuralist notion that "meaning is fluid and indeterminate". Barrie Wade's picture book Give a Dog a Name is an illustration to the class of "ingrained gender bias", while David Wiesner's June 29, 1999, a fantasy book for children aged five and older, is deployed to drive home the basic tenets of postmodernism to secondary school students.

The picture book used to illustrate the theory of deconstruction is Tusk Tusk, by David McKee. First published in 1978, the story concerns a war to the death between black and white elephants and is usually interpreted as a tale about tolerance and intolerance. But Stephens, Watson and Parker warn teachers against reducing the book to this "binary opposition" because "such a move might also be seen as foreclosing meaning in a text that needs careful interrogation by its readers. Its ideology needs to be unpacked and its ambiguities made apparent."

Twenty years after postmodern theory stormed the humanities departments of British, American and Australian universities, provoking a bitter culture war as tradition-minded intellectuals responded with their own jeremiads in works such as Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals, it has insinuated itself into the classroom.

Postmodernism is attracted to extreme cultural relativism and a view of knowledge termed irrealism or nominalism. This holds that there is no relationship between words and the things to which they refer in the world, and hence no such thing as facts. Nothing can be proven, according to this view, and nothing falsified.

Imported into school education under the title critical literacy, postmodern theory's chief aim is to politicise the study of books, films, emails and conversations, now grouped under the catch-all of texts.

From Picture Book to Literary Theory instructs secondary English teachers on how to introduce students to these sophisticated, and highly controversial, articles of faith among postmodern theorists. Its publisher, St Clair Press, estimates the book to have sold 10,000 copies and believes its huge sales can be explained in part because some NSW schools have prescribed it for students as well as teachers.

Irina Dunn, executive director of the NSW Writers Centre and author of The Writer's Guide: A Companion to Writing for Pleasure or Publication, says she is appalled at the introduction of postmodern theory into the classroom.

"In this state we have the Premier, Bob Carr, trying to encourage children to read and to develop a love of reading -- to get back to the basics -- while teachers are opening the classroom to the pestilence of postmodern theory," Dunn says. "Without a love of reading and a sense of enchantment, we are unlikely to encourage lifetime reading, and as we know writers are first and foremost passionate readers."

One of critical literacy's avatars, Allan Luke, a former Queensland education bureaucrat and University of Queensland lecturer teaching in Singapore, describes it as a "radical educational idea" that has moved from the "political outlands to become a key concept in state curriculum". He boasts that "post-colonial, feminist and sociological theory of the [past] few decades proposes a critical education project as a key step in challenging and transforming dominant discourses in post-industrial economies".

In the past few years critical theory has become heavily embedded in all state secondary school syllabses, particularly those of Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. The official website of the Tasmanian school syllabus approves the use of critical literacy and describes how its practitioners "deconstruct the structures and features of texts"; "no longer consider texts to be timeless, universal or unbiased"; ask "if the text presents unequal positions of power"; and "work for social equity and change".

"As we begin to analyse the powerful ways in which visual, spoken, written, multimedia and performance texts work and we discover the ways in which our feelings, attitudes and values are manipulated by language, we begin to operate powerfully within our world. We are able to become agents of social change working towards the removal of inequalities and injustices."

The authors of From Picture Book to Literary Theory instruct teachers and students that deconstruction theory "seeks to undo or `deconstruct' the structures of hierarchical opposition, especially by showing that they depend on an assumption that meaning can be fixed or determined outside language itself. The consequence of such an undoing is that `meaning' becomes provisional and always multiple, never able to be fixed or determined."

They also assert the postmodernist's belief that "no text is innocent", as all texts are ideological. University of Melbourne professor of language and literacy Jo Lo Bianco agrees that texts reflect their historical contexts, but contests the claim that none are innocent: "It suggests that all are guilty; and guilt and innocence are too simple and heavy a burden to lay at the door of many books."

Criticism isn't something the critical theorists have invented, he says. "It has always been an aspect of literacy education, especially when dealing with blatantly propagandistic texts." But the word critical in critical literacy means something other than what is normally understood by the term, and in the hands of the critical theorists has become what Lo Bianco describes as moralistic finger pointing.

"It's very important for literacy development that we retain a sense of an imaginative and creative world for students," Lo Bianco says. "The critical literacy enterprise seems to want to characterise everything as a manipulation from various forces that needs to be unmasked or as an escapist bourgeoise fantasy. They are asking teachers to adopt a particular stance while masquerading as if it is not a stance.

"We need to teach language and teach it well; we need to teach awareness of language, and some of this involves criticism of how language can be used manipulatively, but we also should teach creative, imaginative and articulate language use, both in speech and writing. Extreme critical literacy types sometimes talk as though there is nothing other than criticism."

Christopher Bantick, a Melbourne-based education commentator, says critical literacy enthusiasts presuppose that students are "basically literate" and are pushing them to run with an elaborate theory before they can walk with competent expression. "The problem is that many children cannot read, spell and write reliably. They are incapable of articulating their own experience, nevermind comprehending reliably what they have been presented with in the classroom."

Bantick, a self-confessed traditionalist, laments the politicisation of English teaching by the theorists. "Adherents to the basic teaching of literacy skills -- being able to read, write and comprehend without substantial error -- are deemed to be right-wing and conservative," he says.

"Whereas those who determine a critical literacy approach to the teaching of English attack the conservatives as being backward-looking. As a result of such divisions, many children are not being taught English as a language and are therefore deficient in the basic understanding of their tools of expression."

Luke traces the evolution of critical literacy back to, among other theorists, French theorist Michel Foucault's view "that discourse is not the sovereign production of human subjects but in fact takes on a life of its own, constructing people's identities, realities and social relations; that is, that we are produced by discourse as much as we are producers of discourse. Practically, this translates into a classroom focus on identifying the dominant cultural discourses -- themes, ideologies -- in texts and discussing how these discourses attempt to position and construct readers, their understandings and representations of the world, their social relations, and their identities."

Critical theory also borrows, he says, from "[Jacques] Derrida's views that texts cannot be the objects of definitive interpretations but involve the play of inclusions and exclusions, presences and silences. Practically, this translates into a classroom focus on multiple possible `readings' of texts, on what ideas, themes, characterisations and possible readers are silent or marginalised."

Despite their popularity in the humanities academies, the ideas of Foucault and Derrida have been trenchantly criticised by top-flight philosophers and literary theorists, who regard them as intellectually fraudulent and morally vacuous.

In his recent critique of the movement, titled After Theory, the one-time champion of Foucault and Derrida, British cultural studies professor Terry Eagleton, claims that theory's golden age is long gone. Stanley Fish, one of its American exponents, had in the early 1990s declared that "theory's game is up". Although postmodern theory has been discredited by mainstream philosophers such as John Searle, Bernard Williams and editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy Simon Blackburn, teacher educators are adopting its main tenets as if they were uncontested truths and promoting them in the classroom.

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