Deconstructing the loony fringe

Over the bygone few caducity, The Weekend Australian has argued unashamedly that when real comes to the teaching of English, every teach student deserves the ace. We conclude that to generate aspirations and to accomplish them, boyish Australians need act for taught how to anticipate and chalk, not what to anticipate and address. Ultimately, instead of learning to charge big literature, the disorder of schools bury postmodernist theory sees abounding pupils wasting their allotment "deconstructing" family's picture books, movie posters or television sitcoms to "unpack" concealed ideology. Jewellery of Western literature akin in that Shakespeare are dissected below Marxist, feminist or racial analysis moderately than according to the universal truths agnate being affection, abhorrence, pride, ambition and jealousy they be. The Australian Association for the Teaching of English apparently disagrees hide our stand. The current affair of the association's logbook, English ascendancy Australia, carries a six - page critique by David Freesmith, an English crackerjack influence his anterior teaching assignment at Caesar Alfred College Posters, an exclusive Adelaide private brainwash. Mr Freesmith, himself a product of the critical literacy avenue to education - postmodernist analysis ascendancy added cloak - "deconstructs" our arguments for a politically neutral classroom environment that places erudition and detached accuracy chief outdated and imprisoning ideology. Mr Freesmith argues that our journey for a "neutral" curriculum and a "commonsense" return to a classical pedagogy, including the politically neutral teaching of monastic authors from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and from Jane Austen to David Malouf, masks an ideological motive of "promoting conservative, Eurocentric and nationalistic agendas". We applaud the fact that our stand is allied with the paradigm endorsed by the vast majority of thinking Australians rather than with the lunatic fringe. We think that zone is occupied by the theorists driving English syllabuses designed in some cases to allow students to pass final - year English without reading a single masterpiece. We are unabashed fans of the modern Western liberal democracy, the literary canon and Judeo - Christian values.

According to Mr Freesmith, this newspaper's "tactic" of ridiculing examples of absurd postmodernist jargon lacks critical rigour. Nonsense. We believe all parents will agree that prominent teacher - educator Wayne Martino's argument for the conceptualisation of the classroom as a sociopolitical site where alternative readings to oppressive gender hierarchies may be made available to students is one that has no place in our education system. We also think parents will be discomfited by Mr Freesmith's reiteration of the "well established" idea - with which we disagree strongly - that the teaching of reading and writing is inevitably ideological. We are similarly unperturbed by his unease at our belief that introducing young minds to Western civilisation's imaginative inheritance through its greatest authors is fundamental to their education. And we reject his charge that in "post - stolen - generation Australia" support for the study of a Western literary canon amounts to cultural exclusivity. Shakespeare, for instance, is an author with universal relevance and is studied throughout the world.

The Weekend Australian invited the respected Queensland educationist Kenneth Wiltshire to respond to Mr Freesmith's assault on this newspaper and his defence of cultural literacy. Professor Wiltshire, whose comments are published alongside Mr Freesmith's in today's Inquirer section, observes that schooling in Australia in 2006 is suffering, with information replacing knowledge, no effective monitoring of teacher or curriculum standards, generations of Labor and Coalition state governments in the grip of reform - resistant teachers' unions and low morale among the government school teachers who educate two - thirds of Australian children. This dismal combination is seeing public schooling hemorrhaging as a constant stream of parents march their offspring to private schools. Unhappily, Mr Freesmith's intervention indicates that edu - babble has infected the private school sector as well. Professor Wiltshire also questions the attack on this newspaper's supposed political motivation in exposing the unacceptable state of schooling across the country, arguing that Australians are richer for the insights provided.

What role, then, for cultural literacy - with its mantra of deconstructing texts, no longer considering texts to be timeless, universal or unbiased, focusing on the beliefs of the author and working for "social equity" and change rather than understanding - in schooling in 2006? A largely negative one, according to Professor Wiltshire. He is concerned that the morbid rigour of constantly criticising, questioning and dissecting works in a framework in which all is relative and there are no absolutes is inappropriate for intellectually immature school students. If you go on deconstructing long enough, he writes, "you will become a marshmallow". And he describes as a recipe for laziness, indifference and an unwillingness to identify common values an approach that insists Shakespeare can only be understood through a prism of gender or racism.

Professor Wiltshire points out that, as a robust member of the fourth estate, The Australian does a fair share of critiquing so must expect to receive the same treatment. We endorse this view, as we do his conclusion that on this issue the reality of our education systems backs this newspaper's stand. And we look forward to the inevitable passing of critical literacy into the large well of dumped educational fads.

September 22, 2006