This little pig goes post modernist

Luke Slattery, Additional reporting: Tom Richardson
MATP
800 words
23 July 2005
The Australian
1 - All-round Country
1
English
Copyright 2005 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved

FOR a generation of young readers, Mem Fox's Feathers and Fools is an enchanting story about peacocks, swans and the ugliness of war.

In the eyes of the postmodernist critics, however, it is a skilful piece of propaganda for the cause of male supremacy.

A teaching guide used in secondary schools around the country encourages students to "deconstruct" children's picture books such as Feathers and Fur and to "unpack" the concealed ideology.

The peacocks become the dominant males -- "taller, leading the way, intitiating the dialogue, having the ideas" -- while the cygnets are "smaller, fluffy and dependant".

Twenty years after postmodern theory stormed university humanities departments, it is working its way into Australian classrooms, politicising the study of books, films and emails, now grouped under the catch-all of "texts".

The culturally relativist theory, which teaches that there is no such thing as objective truth, has largely fallen out of fashion on university campuses.

But the new lease of life it has been given in secondary education, under the guise of "critical literacy", is a trend Mem Fox finds "engraging".

"It just drives you mad, it really does," she told The Weekend Australian yesterday.

"You'd have thought academia had moved on from this ... I don't think people are as stupid as that any more, to tell you the truth."

For Australian academics John Stephens, Ken Watson and Judith Parker, compilers of the manual From Picture Book to Literary Theory, the story of the Three Little Pigs is really about "the virtues of property ownership and the safety of the private domain" -- both "key elements of liberal/capitalist ideology".

The editors describe Widow's Broom, by Chris Van Allsburg, as a modern "rethinking of witches, situating them within particular historical conditions in which social, economic and political power narrowly defined women's roles".

Even apparently politically-correct books, such as Anthony Browne's Piggybook, in which a mother rebels against her chauvanist husband and sons, has hidden subversive meanings.

"Her victory is merely the exchange of one chore for another," the editors claim. "All the characters may be smiling but the mother is still outside the family frame."

Critical literacy has been described by one of its champions, Allan Luke, a former Queensland education bureaucrat and lecturer at the University of Queensland's Graduate School of Education who now teaches in Singapore, as a "radical educational idea" that has moved from the "political outlands to become a key concept in state curriculum".

Professor Luke's influence has been felt in the Queensland English syllabus, which pays particular attention to the ideas of critical literacy.

In Tasmania, the official school syllabus website 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."

However the growing band of critics of critical literacy say the approach deprives students of the joy of reading for pleasure, excludes classical texts and ignores basic literacy skills.

Continued -- Page 10

From Page 1

Catherine Runcie, honorary associate of the University of Sydney, described the impact of postmodern theory on schools as "a great pretentious movement of teachers pretending to be intellectuals".

"School teachers and students have much more important things to do," Dr Runcie told The Weekend Australian. "They have basic learning and grammar to master. At university we're still marking grammar and we shouldn't be marking grammar after the age of 15.

"Theory can't be taken on an empty stomach.

"Before students can come to postmodern literature they need to know a lot of literature and a lot of philosophy."

Joseph Lo Bianco, professor of language and literacy at the University of Melbourne, told The Weekend Australian that critical theorists viewed books as "manipulations from various forces that need to be unmasked, or as an escapist bourgeois fantasy".

"They are asking teachers to adopt a particular stance while masquerading as if it is not a stance," he said. "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."

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