A later lithograph of the painting is accompanied with some verses to the following effect: Charming child, absorbed in play, we smile at your precarious efforts. But, just between ourselves, which is more solid— our project, or your house of cards? THINKING AGAIN Education After Postmodernism Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series Edited by Henry A. Giroux BERGIN & GARVEY Westport, Connecticut • London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thinking again : education after postmodernism / by Nigel Blake . . . [et al.]. p. cm.—(Critical studies in education and culture series. ISSN 1064-8615) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89789-511-8 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-89789-512-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Education—Philosophy. 2. Education—Great Britain— Philosophy. 3. Postmodernism and education. 4. Postmodernism and education—Great Britain. I. Blake, Nigel. II. Series. LB14.7.T55 1998 370'. 1—^dc21 97-27886 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1998 by Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-27886 ISBN: 0-89789-511-8 0-89789-512-6 (pbk.) ISSN: 1064-8615 First published in 1998 Bergin & Garvey, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 Copyright Acknowledgments The authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: "The Errand" from The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1996 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd. We'll Meet Again by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles. Copyright © 1939 (Renewed) by Irwin Dash Music Co., Ltd. All rights for the Western Hemisphere controlled by Music Sales Corporation. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission. Frontispiece: Jean-Siméon Chardin. The House of Cards. Reproduced with permission of The Trustees of the National Gallery, London. Contents Series Foreword by Henry A. Giroux ix Acknowledgments xiii Retrospect 1 1. Poststructuralism and the Spectre of Relativism 7 2. Foundations Demolished, Sovereigns Deposed: The New Politics of Knowledge 21 3. The Ascription of Identity 35 4. Literacy Under the Microscope 47 5. Shifting, Shifted, ... Shattered: The Ethical Self 59 6. Giving Someone a Lesson 81 7. Telling Stories Out of School 91 8. The Responsibility of Desire 111 9. Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags 131 10. Learning by Heart 145 11. The Learning Pharmacy 157 12. Reading Education 175 Prospect 185 References 191 Author Index 197 Subject Index 199 Series Foreword Educational reform has fallen upon hard times. The traditional assumption that schooling is fundamentally tied to the imperatives of citizenship designed to educate students to exercise civic leadership and public service has been eroded. The schools are now the key institution for producing professional, technically trained, credentialized workers for whom the demands of citizenship are subordinated to the vicissitudes of the marketplace and the commercial public sphere. Given the current corporate and right wing assault on public and higher education coupled with the emergence of a moral and political climate that has shifted to a new Social Darwinism, the issues which framed the democratic meaning, purpose, and use to which education might aspire have been displaced by more vocational and narrowly ideological considerations. The war waged against the possibilities of an education wedded to the precepts of a real democracy is not merely ideological. Against the backdrop of reduced funding for public schooling, the call for privatization, vouchers, cultural uniformity, and choice, there are the often ignored larger social realities of material power and oppression. On the national level, there has been a vast resurgence of racism. This is evident in the passing of anti-immigration laws such as Proposition 187 in California, the dismantling of the welfare state, the demonization of black youth that is taking place in the popular media, and the remarkable attention provided by the media to forms of race talk that argue for the intellectual inferiority of blacks or dismiss calls for racial justice as simply a holdover from the "morally bankrupt" legacy of the 1960s. Poverty is on the rise among children in the United States, with 20 percent of all children under the age of eighteen living below the poverty line. Unemployment is growing at an alarming rate for poor youth of color, especially in the urban centers. While black youth are policed and disciplined in and out of the nation's schools, conservative and liberal educators define education through the ethically limp discourses of privatization, national standards, and global competitiveness. Many writers in the critical education tradition have attempted to challenge the right wing fundamentalism behind educational and social reform in both the United States and abroad while simultaneously providing ethical signposts for a public discourse about education and democracy that is both prophetic and transformative. Eschewing traditional categories, a diverse number of critical theorists and educators have successfully exposed the political and ethical implications of the cynicism and despair that has become endemic to the discourse of schooling and civic life. In its place, such educators strive to provide a X Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism language of hope that inextricably links the struggle over schooling to understanding and transforming our present social and cultural dangers. At the risk of overgeneralizing, both cultural studies theorists and critical educators have emphasized the importance of understanding theory as the grounded basis for "intervening into contexts and power ... in order to enable people to act more strategically in ways that may change their context for the better."1 Moreover, theorists in both fields have argued for the primacy of the political by calling for and struggling to produce critical public spaces, regardless of how fleeting they may be, in which "popular cultural resistance is explored as a form of political resistance."2 Such writers have analyzed the challenges that teachers will have to face in redefining a new mission for education, one that is linked to honoring the experiences, concerns, and diverse histories and languages that give expression to the multiple narratives that engage and challenge the legacy of democracy. Equally significant is the insight of recent critical educational work that connects the politics of difference with concrete strategies for addressing the crucial relationships between schooling and the economy, and citizenship and the politics of meaning in communities of multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual schools. Critical Studies in Education and Culture attempts to address and demonstrate how scholars working in the fields of cultural studies and critical pedagogy might join together in a radical project and practice informed by theoretically rigorous discourses that affirm the critical but refuse the cynical, and establish hope as central to a critical pedagogical and political practice but eschew a romantic utopianism. Central to such a project is the issue of how pedagogy might provide cultural studies theorists and educators with an opportunity to engage pedagogical practices that are not only transdisciplinary, transgressive, and oppositional, but also connected to a wider project designed to further racial, economic, and political democracy.3 By taking seriously the relations between culture and power, we further the possibilities of resistance, struggle, and change. Critical Studies in Education and Culture is committed to publishing work that opens a narrative space that affirms the contextual and the specific while simultaneously recognizing the ways in which such spaces are shot through with issues of power. The series attempts to continue an important legacy of theoretical work in cultural studies in which related debates on pedagogy are understood and addressed within the larger context of social responsibility, civic courage, and the reconstruction of democratic public life. We must keep in mind Raymond Williams's insight that the "deepest impulse (informing cultural politics) is the desire to make learning part of the process of social change itself."4 Education as a cultural pedagogical practice takes place across multiple sites, which include not only schools and universities but also the mass media, popular culture, and other public spheres, and signals how within diverse contexts, education makes us both subjects of and subject to relations of power. This series challenges the current return to the primacy of market values and simultaneous retreat from politics so evident in the recent work of educational Series Foreword XI theorists, legislators, and policy analysts. Professional relegitimation in a troubled time seems to be the order of the day as an increasing number of academics both refuse to recognize public and higher education as critical public spheres and offer little or no resistance to the ongoing vocationalization of schooling, the continuing evisceration of the intellectual labor force, and the current assaults on the working poor, the elderly, and women and children.5 Emphasizing the centrality of politics, culture, and power, Critical Studies in Education and Culture will deal with pedagogical issues that contribute in imaginative and transformative ways to our understanding of how critical knowledge, democratic values, and social practices can provide a basis for teachers, students, and other cultural workers to redefine their role as engaged and public intellectuals. Each volume will attempt to rethink the relationship between language and experience, pedagogy and human agency, and ethics and social responsibility as part of a larger project for engaging and deepening the prospects of democratic schooling in a multiracial and multicultural society. Critical Studies in Education and Culture takes on the responsibility of witnessing and addressing the most pressing problems of public schooling and civic life, and engages culture as a crucial site and strategic force for productive social change. Henry A. Giroux NOTES 1. L. Grossberg (1996). Toward a genealogy of the state of cultural studies. In C. Nelson & D. P. Gaonkar (Eds.), Disciplinarity and dissent in cultural studies. New York: Routledge, p. 143. 2. D. Bailey & S. Hall (1992). The vertigo of displacement. Ten 8, 2(3), p. 19. 3. My notion of transdisciplinarity comes from M. Zavarzadeh & D. Morton (1992). Theory, pedagogy, politics: The crisis of the 'subject' in the humanities. In M. Zavarzadeh & D. Morton (Eds.), Theory pedagogy politics: Texts for change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, p. 10. At issue here is neither ignoring the boundaries of discipline-based knowledge nor simply fusing different disciplines, but creating theoretical paradigms, questions, and knowledge that cannot be taken up within the policed boundaries of the existing disciplines. 4. R. Williams (1989). Adult education and social change. In What I came to say. London: Hutchinson-Radus, p. 158. 5. The term "professional legitimation" comes from a personal correspondence with Professor Jeff Williams of East Carolina University. Acknowledgments This book is the product of two years' collaborative work. The idea originated with an invitation to us from Wilfred Carr to present a symposium on postmodernism and education at the annual conference of the Philosophy of Education Society held in Oxford, England, in 1995. The project developed in a way that neither he nor we would have imagined at the time. We are grateful to him for providing the original impetus. In the course of this project we have met together on numerous occasions. We thank the Society for the grants we received in support of this work. We also thank the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Dundee, the University of Durham, and the Open University for their support and for contributions to our expenses. The Penn Club in Bedford Place, London, provided friendly and congenial accommodation for our meetings. Special thanks are due to Betty Vanden Bavière for the great care and unfailing patience she has shown in preparing the text for publication.