Postmodernism
FOCUS What elements of existentialism appeal to you as a teacher? Which appeal least? Why? Are there elements of existentialism that you would like to incorporate into your philosophy of education?
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students to make their own choices about their own education. Liberated from a prescribed curriculum and academic requirements, students were free to choose what, when, and how they learned. Neill found his students actually wanted to learn and eagerly pursued their own educational agendas.24 Literature, drama, and film are especially powerful in existentialist teaching. An example of existentialist teaching might be a senior high school history class that is studying the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews in Europe during World War II by the Nazis. The class views Steven Spielberg’s movie, Schindler’s List, in which an industrialist, Oscar Schindler, who initially profited from the forced labor of Jewish concentration camp inmates, makes a conscious decision to save his workers from death in the Nazi gas chambers. The class then probes the moral situation of one man, Schindler, and the choice that he made in a senseless and cruel world.
6-6 Postmodernism postmodernism A philosophy that
Postmodernism contends that the modern period of history has ended and that we
constructivism A theory of learning
now live in a postmodern era. It originated in the philosophies of the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Martin Heidegger (1899–1976). Nietzsche dismissed metaphysical claims about universal truth, suggesting that they were contrived to replace worn-out myths and supernatural beliefs with newer but equally false assertions.25 Formulating a philosophy called phenomenology, Heidegger asserted that human beings construct their own subjective truths about reality from their intuitions, perceptions, and reflections as they interact with phenomena. Postmodernism exerts a strong intellectual influence today, especially in the humanities and philosophy.26 Postmodernism has implications for constructivism, a psychology and method of education. Postmodernists and constructivists agree that we make, or construct, our beliefs about knowledge from our experiences of interacting with our environment. As a human construction, our knowledge is always tentative, conjectural, and subject to ongoing revision. Because our statements, or our texts, about knowledge are a construction of how we perceive reality rather than a correspondence with reality, they can be deconstructed, or taken apart. Collaborative learning, the sharing of experiences and ideas through language, makes our discourse about knowledge both a personal and a social construction.27
is highly skeptical of the truth of metanarratives, the canons that purport to be authoritative statements of universal or objective truth. Rather, postmodernists regard these canons as historical statements that rationalize one group’s domination of another.
which argues that children learn most effectively and readily by constructing ideas based on direct explorations of the environment.
6-6a Key Concepts The French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were key figures in developing postmodernism. Like Nietzsche, Foucault totally rejected the premodern idealist and realist claims that there are universal and unchanging truths. However, Foucault’s major attack was on the modern experts, especially scientists, social scientists, and educators, who claim that they are impartial, objective, and unbiased. He contends that what these experts pronounce to be objective truth is really a disguised rationale
A. S. Neill, Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood (London: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995); Mark Vaughan, Summerhill and A. S. Neill (London: Open University Press, 2006). The website for Neill’s Summerhill School is www.summerhillschool.co.uk/pages/index.html. 25 For an incisive and insightful discussion of postmodernism, see Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002). Also, see Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, Mike Cole, and Glen Ritowski, Postmodernism in Educational Theory: Education and the Politics of Human Resistance (London: Tufnell Press, 1999). 26 David E. Cooper, World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 467. 27 John A. Zahorik, Constructivist Teaching (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1995), pp. 10–13. Also, see Marie Larouchelle and Nadine Bendarz, eds., Constructivism and Education (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 24
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