Fading theory has no place in schools

Luke Slattery
MATP
441 words
23 July 2005
The Australian
1 - All-round Country
10
English
Copyright 2005 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Comment

POSTMODERNIST theory has had its day, and is now a waning force in intellectual life -- except in our schools, where it has been belatedly, and inappropriately, introduced.

Critical literacy is often promoted as a necessary response to a rapidly-changing world in which students are assaulted by untold media messages.

But postmodernism's intellectual assumptions -- truth is a matter of opinion, there is no real world outside of language and hence no facts independent of our descriptions of them -- render it an entirely inappropriate teaching tool in an era of information excess.

As Julian Baggini, editor and co-publisher of The Philosopher's Magazine, observes in Making Sense, Philosophy Behind the Headlines, that cultural relativism is widespread in the classroom.

"What we need to realise is that, at least when it comes to the facts about events, there is truth and there is falsehood and we need to be able to distinguish between the two. We should not confuse a justifiable desire to avoid imposing one point of view on others with a rejection of the idea of truth," he says.

"Indeed, to form any sensible judgment at all about the war on terrorism we need to accept that there are some facts to base these judgments on."

Students are manifestly not doing well enough in the basics -- comprehension, analysis and expression -- to be asked to assimilate notions such as deconstruction that stem from a bewilderingly complex school of continental philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy, with traditions in structural linguistics and phenomenology (the science of phenomena).

Academics report that students are entering university ill-equipped to write coherent sentences, let alone essays. The critical literacy theorists are asking them to run a hurdle race before they can walk with ease.

Postmodern theory is a tool that should ideally be handled by the subtle and well-read; by those already steeped in the intellectual tradition. To introduce the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and the rest at school level, admittedly in a boiled down form, is simply irresponsible. In the hands of second-rate intellects, postmodern theory has become stultifyingly doctrinaire; there is a risk of students being exposed to this at school.

Nor are students well enough acquainted with their own cultural traditions for teachers to justify dumbing down the school curriculum by treating all forms of communication literature, films, emails and even conversations as texts equally worthy of their attention. This is one of the consequences of postmodernist influence over the university curriculum: King Lear is the pedagogical equivalent of King Kong.

[AUS_T-20050723-1-010-479111 ]

Document AUSTLN0020050722e17n0006c