Put literacy before `radical' vanity

Luke Slattery, Matt Price is on leave
MATP
886 words
30 July 2005
The Australian
1 - All-round Country
32
English
Copyright 2005 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved

ALONG time ago in a galaxy not that far away, I finished a BA honours thesis using a Foucauldian perspective on an aspect of US foreign policy.

This was in the early '80s and postmodern theory, later badged Theory, seemed like a funky new analytical tool with a dash of French glamour and some serious avant-gardist pretensions. It rose to prominence in France after May 1968: radical intellectuals, frustrated by their inability to overthrow the state, decided to subvert texts instead. Postmodernism was the place Marxism went when Marxism went (or left the building).

Halfway through a masters degree -- recycling the same old Foucauldian notions -- I got the call-up to newspapers and left university behind. When I turned a few years later to check Theory's progress in the academy I was shocked: that bright analytical thread had been fashioned into a suffocating blanket of orthodoxy.

I called my old fourth-year language and ideology teacher, who described it as the new "desiderata" of all PhDs. Theory had become, in a relatively short space of time, an intellectual dialect, or idiolect, which might help academics of a certain predisposition to talk to one another, but would hinder their attempts to talk to the world. And so it has proven.

Recently I stumbled across a few curriculum documents hinting at the influence of the same '60s-era theories in the school curriculum. My unease, this time, was even more profound.

This grab bag of ideas pioneered by intellectuals on the fringe of French intellectual life had swept to power in the anglophone universities, but it should never have become a pedagogy for use in schools. And yet here was a textbook insinuating deconstruction, post-structuralism and cultural studies into Year 9, by applying them to much-loved children's picture books.

Some people object to the pretentious jargon used by exponents of Theory: a signifier is really just a word; a signified a thing; and a trope a turn of phrase or figure or speech.

Theorists love to explicate a text, when to explicate is simply the French infinitive to explain. Others are troubled by the way it sanctions a "mindless scepticism", in the words of one US academic, and a kind of toadying to an official line set by the Gallic pantheon: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and, of course, Michel Foucault. This says more about the disciples, I'm afraid, than their masters: the capacity for independent thought being a rare intellectual commodity in our universities.

Philosophers are by and large immune to Theory's siren call and it has ceased to be philosophically credible, if it ever was.

Derrida stresses the "indeterminancy" of meaning, which is in any case "endlessly deferred", and tells us that there is nothing outside of texts ("Il n'y a pas de hors-texte") and thus no possibility of knowledge or truth. Deconstruction, ultimately, deconstructs meaning, disappearing up its own backside. Before embracing theories anchored in such notions, education systems should have been open about what they were up to.

The Australian has shown during the past week that texts are being prepared for English studies across Australia introducing postmodern Theory into the classroom, and that these are being promoted, and in some cases published, by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.

A strand of literacy tuition termed critical literacy has also been developed from the ideas of Derrida and Foucault -- a "radical educational idea", according to its champions -- for use in Australian schools.

It is an important component in the English syllabus across the country, particularly in Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia. Critical literacy is a form of politics: of resistance to the "ideologies" imposed by texts, to ape its own jargon, and to the structures of power within "dominant narratives". Theorists are quite explicit about this. But parents are none the wiser.

The letters pages of The Australian have been on the boil this past week with responses to our dispatches from the postmodern classroom. A few points of clarification: rejecting critical literacy does not entail jettisoning criticism. Criticism has always been part of the classroom, and should remain so.

Adopting the orthodoxies of postmodernism, however, is unlikely to encourage independence of mind and will do little for core literacy. Literary texts are never constructed, and have no need of deconstruction: but they do need to be comprehended, analysed, and criticised. Just as importantly, students need to master the tools of literate expression, and here critical literacy, with its clunky jargon, is more hindrance than help.

I have never, as one correspondent suggested, argued that literary texts contain single truths.

But postmodernism does hold to an anti-realist theory of knowledge at odds with commonsense, as well as scientific and philosophical notions of truth: parents should be made aware of this, as should teachers who are not already. Nor, finally, should The Australian's expose on the postmodern classroom beseen as part of a conservative political agenda.

Critical literacy's "radicalism" is simply a bien-pensant vanity. Schools will more affectively fulfil their social justice aims by teaching underprivileged children comprehension, analysis and expression: the traditional aims of literacy.

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