Plain Truth Is We Are Failing Kids
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday February 28, 2002
HSC students are being trapped in a conformist box of postmodernist thought.
TEACHERS marking HSC exams last year were ringing their union in tears, distressed that new criteria made it impossible to be fair to students. With the futures of the class of 2001 decided, Jennifer Leete, the Teachers Federation deputy president, said yesterday that she was not sure whether the problems reported by markers were just those of a new system bedding in or that the new HSC is ``a complete debacle".
Either way, there has been such a stink about the much ballyhooed new HSC that it is the subject of an inquiry by the director of the Australian Council for Educational Research, Geoff Masters.
But, since practical problems abound across most subjects, it's likely that the most disturbing and insidious problem of all, the infection of the new English syllabus with the virus of postmodern critical theory, probably won't get much of a hearing in the inquiry, due to be completed late next month. Masters, in Sydney taking evidence, was unavailable yesterday.
The criticism of the new post-modern English syllabus is more than just that it's been dumbed down, with Star Wars, Frontline and the ATSIC Web site among prescribed texts. It is more than the fact the 2001 HSC English exams were riddled with political correctness, that Natasha Stott Despoja's maiden speech was reprinted in all its glory, or that, of 12 ``great speeches" students were offered for ``critical study", the only Australians featured were Paul Keating and Noel Pearson.
It is that even if students do study Shakespeare and Keats, they are being asked to do so with the postmodern tongue in the cheek and through the prism of extreme scepticism the theory requires. They are expected to absorb postmodernism's core belief, that there is no absolute truth, that all facts are relative. They are required not just to read literature, but to ``deconstruct" the texts and discover their authors' hidden motives.
As Naomi Smith, a trained, but not practising, teacher, wrote in this month's Sydney's Child magazine, such an approach has led to ``a significant narrowing of the intellectual freedom allowed to students, who must now tailor their exploration of texts to fit particular theoretical objectives".
Smith, who has a BA in English from Macquarie University in 1981, studied for a Diploma of Education at Charles Sturt University in 1988. She says she was alarmed at the extent to which postmodern theory had permeated the curriculum of a course that was educating teachers. Theories of postmodern icons Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault and Roland Barthes were taught and ``guidance on how to apply them in the classroom" was given.
``My fear is that the postmodern approach will cut young people off from texts," she says. ``They're not looking at ideas as ideas but as political or cultural framework or gender stereotyping. It's creating an attitude of distrust towards language and the ability of language to convey truth and great ideas."
Smith singles out the teacher education textbook, Re-Viewing English, which advocates this new approach, teaching teachers to ask students to rewrite a poem from a different point of view. Eg: ``A poem that describes a farmer sowing seeds by night, comparing the farmer and the land to lovers, is re-examined in terms of a patriarchal relationship where the image is `potentially one of rape', or in terms of colonial exploitation of the land."
Smith finished her teaching degree but has never taught partly because ``I didn't want to be trapped into teaching something I didn't believe in".
In the 2001 HSC, postmodernism was addressed in English Extension 1: ``You have been asked to speak to students who are about to decide which elective to choose for next year's HSC English Extension 1 course. Persuade them to choose the Postmodernism elective by drawing attention to the adventure of postmodernism as a way into thinking about texts." The question leaves no room for the student who might dissent from ``the adventure of postmodernism".
Similarly, Question 11 in the English (Advanced) Paper 2 prescribes an attitude which students must adopt. It begins: ``You have created an exhibition of texts entitled: `One person's truth is ..."' and asks students to write a speech for the opening night of the exhibition. ``In your speech explain how the exhibition reflects your vision of the representations of truth."
Dr Barry Spurr, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Sydney, says the 2001 English exam ``confirms my worst fears about the use of literature for political and social comment." Yesterday, in his office, he leafed through the exam papers, groaning: ``It's a horror".
For instance, Question 10 of the Standard English paper 2, about ``Consumerism" and the poetry of Bruce Dawe, asks students to pretend they work for the Department of Consumer Affairs ``and your workplace supervisor has asked you to write a report based on your investigations of how texts influence consumers".
``Why bother them with this at all?" says Spurr. ``Why not let the kids read the poem and come to their own conclusion, having appreciated the poem as a poem?"
The most sinister aspect of the post-modern approach is that students are expected to relate to the text according to a ``pre-decided response", he says. ``You have to have the `correct attitude to consumerism'." There is no room for students who might read Dawes's poems and hanker after more whitegoods.
Of course, critics of post-modernism are easily dismissed as cultural dinosaurs imprisoned by their decadent value systems. Even those English teachers who hate the new syllabus are locked into getting their students the best possible HSC mark. Their students can be expected to do no more than dutifully conform.
© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald