Howard rocks!
Posted on 04/20/2006 2:21:49 PM PDT by naturalman1975
JOHN Howard believes the postmodern approach to literature being taught in schools is "rubbish" and is considering tying education funding to ending the "gobbledegook" taught in some states.
The Prime Minister made the threat after accusing the state education authorities of "dumbing down" the English syllabus and succumbing to political correctness.
"I feel very, very strongly about the criticism that many people are making that we are dumbing down the English syllabus," Mr Howard said.
Australia's most distinguished literary scholar, Leonie Kramer, yesterday agreed with the Prime Minister's criticism of how English is taught in high schools. Dame Leonie, professor emeritus in Australian literature at the University of Sydney, said what worried her was "the notion that you have to read, let us say Shakespeare, in relation to contemporary preoccupations such as race and class".
Education Minister Julie Bishop has raised concerns over Western Australia's outcomes-based education system, claiming it is "inevitable" that standards will fall.
When asked about the "outcomes-based" program, Mr Howard replied: "That is gobbledegook - what does that mean?"
Ms Bishop is expected to drive the reform push at the next meeting with state education ministers, scheduled for either June or July.
The minister, who is overseas at present, is keen to push for greater national consistency on English curriculums, amid concerns that senior high school students are not being sufficiently challenged on traditional texts.
Mr Howard may also seek to have education standards placed on the agenda for the next Council of Australian Governments, also scheduled to be held in June.
But senior government sources yesterday played down suggestions that Canberra would seek to "stand over" the states in the public debate over education standards.
Mr Howard said: "I share the views of many people about the so-called postmodernism ... I just wish that independent education authority didn't succumb on occasions to the political correctness it appears to succumb to."
The criticism of teaching standards followed revelations in The Weekend Australian that a prestigious Sydney school, SCEGGS Darlinghurst, had asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives.
"I think there's evidence of that (dumbing down) in different parts of the country ... when the, what I might call the traditional texts, are treated no differently from pop cultural commentary, as appears to be the case in some syllabuses," Mr Howard told the ABC.
Western Australia's introduction of a Year 12 English exam that fails to penalise students for poor spelling or grammar and asks students to compare two film posters but not read a book has also been blasted by Canberra.
Rather than dictating what students should know by a specified time and then grading them, outcomes-based education focuses on what students are able to do.
Mr Howard's intervention drew a stinging response from the states and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley.
"Instead of telling everyone what they should read, John Howard should make his ministers read cables about the bribes to Saddam Hussein," Mr Beazley said.
Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford also accused the Prime Minister of trying to divert attention away from the AWB kickbacks scandal.
Mr Welford said Mr Howard's blanket denigration of school curriculums was an attempt to divert attention from "other pressing issues, such as the appalling unethical dealings by AWB, over which he has presided".
"The fact is, in Queensland we do value the traditional literature as well as more popular media," Mr Welford said.
NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt indicated her state's syllabus was more likely to comply with Mr Howard's view because it had a strong base in classical English literature
"NSW has compulsory Shakespeare in Years 9 to 10 and for the Year 12 advanced English courses," she told The Australian yesterday.
"Other authors on the HSC reading list include Chaucer, Yeats, Wordsworth and Jane Austen. The more modern classics include George Orwell, David Williamson, David Malouf and Michael Ondaatje."
Victoria's Education Minister Lynn Kosky accused Mr Howard of being "ill-informed" on the issue.
"The Prime Minister is out of touch with what is going on in Victorian schools and what students are reading," Ms Kosky said.
Mr Howard's statement was embraced by anti-OBE campaigners yesterday, who said their views had been vindicated.
PLATO WA co-founder Greg Williams said Mr Howard's comments were an accurate description of the controversial system that is currently being implemented in Western Australia.
"It is not gobbledegook to everyone but it is gobbledegook to the teachers, it's gobbledegook to the students and it's gobbledegook to the parents. These three groups are the only ones that matter when it comes to outcomes-based education."
Teacher of literature at the University of Western Australia Peter Morgan said many teachers were just as confused and disappointed as their students at the shift from teaching English literature to focusing on literary theory and its sub-branches.
Associate Professor Morgan said the English literature syllabus in Western Australia was being replaced by a course called "Texts, traditions and cultures", which had led to a large degree of dissatisfaction and low morale among teachers.
"Literary theory covers a broad range of cultural and social theory from Marxism to post-structuralism, feminism and queer theory," he said. "It's very obscure. It encourages students to use buzzwords and jargon to cover up that they have no idea what they're talking about.
"Teachers are disappointed they are not teaching literature any more. They feel the subject has been hijacked by those who want to teach about race, gender and Marxism, rather than about literature.
"I read what the students write, and hear what the teachers have to say, and there is a lot of confusion."
Howard rocks!
Most yes, but not all - and the idealogues who've basically been most responsible for our English courses in Australia over the last few years (like Alan Luke for example) are both post-modernists and Marxists. I can't say for certain if he's a feminist.
Well you can be a Marxist and a Structuralist as well that doesn't imply causation. Postmodernism is a cultural logic and is apolitical.
Postermodernism is unlearning. To the extent that it is learning at all, it is learned confusion and insanity.
I wouldn't say postmodernism is apoltical exactly. It can infect the thinking of all ideologies to a point; but for the most part, a consistent conservative can't really be a postmodernist. The theories of conservatism are too based on absolute truth. Conservatives are by nature traditionalists. Liberals can be modernists or post-modernists. You might find someone who calls himself a conservative and a postmodernist, but the rest of us would call him a RINO or a CINO.
That isn't exactly the broadest spectrum - it's sort of lumped up over there on the left. Post-structuralists and post-modernists aren't the same breed of cat these days but the amount of intellectual sludge you have to wade through to recognize that there is a significant difference is astonishing (and sort of futile since to both schools "significance" is a heavily negotiable term).
The real problem with this sort of thing with respect to Shakespeare is that the latter's universalist treatment of human emotions is antithetical to the idea that they must be interpreted through the filters of queer or feminist theory in order to extract the proper subtextual meaning. ("Proper" turns out to be negotiable too.) The result is a terrible hash and it's no wonder the kiddies are confused by it.
PoMo taken consistently is anarchy. It's a set of glasses through which to see the world in novel ways. But at some point you have to take the glasses off or replace them with another pair.
bump for publicity
And the goal is not to really see anything in any rational sense, but only to find confusion where none really exists. It's an activity of imagination. That's what I meant by learned confusion and insanity. People who dwell in that mental realm larely lose touch with reality.
Most of the PoMos I have encountered used to be dogmatic Marxists until the Soviet Union collapsed, and rather than confess that capitalism won they found refuge in PoMo.
That's my point. Many of the PoMos I have studied were former Marxists who gave up on a dogmatic view of the world after the USSR fell. This is particularly true of the French PoMos.
Most who consider themselves postmodernists are inconsistent or partial postmodernists using the strict definition of postmodernism. A consistent PoMo will say there is no cultural basis to be judged, which means Nazism, Kipling/Joseph Chamberlain-kind "civilizational mission" imperialism, Leopold II type exploitative imperialism, American muscular patriotism, French-Euro Gallic nationalism, communism, free market libertarianism, Euro social market democracy, "Third Way-ism", classical Metternich Ancien regime authoritarism, Third World Marxo-nationalism, Mussolini Fascism, you-name-it-ism are all equally valid. "Who are we to judge?", in other words, is the motto.
But evidences from our self-avowed postmodernists suggest they don't believe in this way. Most are quite classical absolutist in stance when it comes to judging American patriotism or classical European absolute monarchy (not saying that they are equivalent, but most typical Western academics treat these two with equal contempt). And they are the first to denounce Western patriotism, but tolerate to a great length Third World nationalism.
What a bit of comedy that is. Anyone who is aware of the intellectual scene is aware of what has happened. Vulgar Marxism is out. Deconstructing Nietzsche and Heidegger and enlisting them in the cause of egalitarian socialism is in.
Now instead of individual consciousness being necessarily conditioned by the economic realities of vulgar Marxism, they are conditioned by the cultural realities of gender and race.
That is the reality. To say that feminists and Marxists hate postmodernism is simply goofy.
Good job, PM Howard
Allan Bloom once wrote that deconstruction does for literary criticism what Huey Long did for politics: Every man a critic.
He was right. Deconstruction is a "tool," all right. It's a tool for self-satisfied nihilists who inhabit our universities. It makes the study of literature an impossibility.
Which, come to think of it, may be the point.
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