Educational Implications

6-6b Educational implications

Like existentialists, postmodernist teachers want to raise their students’ consciousness. While existentialists focus on consciousness about personal choice, postmodernists focus on consciousness about social inequalities by deconstructing traditional assumptions about knowledge, education, schooling, and instruction. They do not regard the school’s curriculum as a repository of objective truths and scientific findings to be transmitted to students. It is an arena of conflicting viewpoints—some of which dominate and subordinate others.

Postmodernists see American public schools as battlegrounds, as contested sites in the struggle for social, political, or economic equality or domination. They contend that the official curriculum is full of rationales, constructed by powerful groups seeking to legitimize their own privileged socioeconomic status and to dominate, or socially control, other less-fortunate people. They dispute such official educational policy claims that public schools (1) fairly and equitably educate all children; (2) facilitate upward social and economic mobility; and (3) are necessary for maintaining a democratic society. In contrast, postmodernists argue that public schools, like other official institutions, help reproduce a society that is (1) patriarchal—it favors men over women; (2) Eurocentric—its so-called official knowledge is largely a construction of white people of European ancestry; and (3) capitalist—private property and the corporate mentality are glorified in the free-market ideology (particularly in the United States) that gives the false promise that individual initiative and competition will lead to social mobility. The experiences of other groups, such as people of color, the poor, and women, are given brief, marginal comments in the curriculum’s official narratives.31

If we think of the school as a contested arena, we can see how postmodernists deconstruct the curriculum. Proponents of official knowledge want a standard cultural core curriculum in secondary and higher education that is based on the traditional canons of Western culture. Postmodernists challenge these canons as representing male-dominated, European-centered, Western, and capitalist culture. They argue that the contributions of underrepresented groups—Africans, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans; women; the economically disadvantaged; and gays and lesbians—should be included in the curriculum, even at its core, if there is still a core. Postmodernists contend that a culturally diverse curriculum would reach all children, especially those marginalized in contemporary schools.

Postmodernists refer to instruction as a “representation” in which teachers use narratives, stories, images, music, and other cultural constructions to inform students about reality and values. 32 For example, a teacher in a social studies class who is presenting (making a representation) a unit on the history and controversy relating to immigration needs to be conscious that the sources she is using and the media coverage that her students hear are biased. Postmodernists urge teachers to become conscious of their powerful roles and to critically examine their representations to students. Rather than transmit only officially approved knowledge, teachers must critically represent a wider but more inclusive range of human experience.33 Students are entitled to hear many voices and many stories, including their own autobiographies and biographies. While postmodernists and pragmatists agree that the curriculum should include discussion of controversial issues, postmodernists do not emphasize the scientific method as do pragmatists. The scientific method, for postmodernists, represents another metanarrative (a narrative or exposition that is claimed to have global authority) used to

31Angeline Martel and Linda Peterat, “Margins of Exclusion, Margins of Transformation: The Place of Women in Education,” in Rebecca A. Martusewicz and William M. Reynolds, Inside/Out: Contemporary Critical Perspectives in Education (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 152. 32Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Representation, Self-Representation, and the Meanings of Difference: Questions for Educators,” in Rebecca A. Martusewicz and William M. Reynolds, Inside/Out: Contemporary Critical Perspectives in Education, p. 100. 33Ibid., pp. 100–101