Wednesday 10 March 2010

Power, Postmodernism and Education


My paper called 'Class Consciousness, Power, Identity and the Motivation to Teach' has just been accepted in the Journal 'Power and Education'. I have not published in this journal before. It's good to see an end result to the research process.
I'm writing about postmodernism for my book 'Literacy on the Left' and the bitter disputes between those on the left who take a postmodern position to resistance and the Marxists. Of course Marxism is thought to be an over-simplistic deterministic metanarrative to the PMs.
Marxists perceive Postmodernist thought to have links to the doctines of the free market.
McLaren in a discussion (2001:36) says of postmodernists: ' They are embarrased by the language of Marxism and label you as hopelessly old-fashioned and naive. They wonder why, for instance, I would want to limit my reading audience by using Marxist analysis. Their revolution is basically an aesthetic one, and their revolutionary activity consists largely of going shopping' Phew!
Dave Hill (2001:40), in the same transcribed discussion says:
'Postmodernist analysis, it seems to me, with its stress on segmentation, differentiation, collective disempowerment and its telos of individuated desire, justifies the current marketised, neo-liberal project of capital'
I'm reading a good book at the moment to look at the issues in education that the Bolsheviks faced after the Russion revolution concerning 'left' education policy: Sheila Fitzpatrick's (1979) 'Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union'. I may blog about this in the future.
'

No comments:

Post a Comment