Postmodernism Essay ⋆ Education Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

From the perspective of postmodern theory, modern education is seen as the mass education that began in the nineteenth century with standardized curriculum, grades, degrees, and public accreditation. It is criticized as homogenizing, normalizing, and imposing the norms, practices, and values of the dominant society on the young. Modern education, from this perspective, corresponds in the field of education to mass production and consumption characterizing modern societies, and an era dominated by corporations, the state, military, and educational institutions marked by bureaucracy, a technical system of instrumentalized rules and regulations, and mass conformity. Proposals for a reconfiguration of education to suit a postmodern philosophy and electronic technology have been made. This entry contrasts the modern and postmodern views and looks at their application to education.

Modern Versus Postmodern

Modern education is connected to an era of print technology and literacy based on reading books. As Marshall McLuhan argued in the mid-1960s, in works such as Understanding Media, different societies have various dominant media that provide diverse modes of society, culture, and education. McLuhan distinguishes between premodern oral culture and traditions, modern print culture, and (postmodern) electronic culture. In traditional, premodern societies, education is oral and transmits relatively fixed and changing traditions and a hierarchic, authoritarian social structure.

For McLuhan, the major instrument of modernity was the emergence of print technology that created an entirely new modern culture, and modes of education and subjectivity with print media dominant. Modern culture and education were highly nationalistic, often determined by the state and reproducing national cultures. Modern education tended to be secular, following the enlightenment and predicated on a separation of church and state. Modern education was organized on the factory and industrial system with public and private buildings and grounds, and classes organized around time periods.

In McLuhan’s view, new electronic technologies create new modes of culture connected to media like radio, film, television, and now computers, and create new forms of subjectivity that are more sensory, multimodal, fragmented, and decentered. For McLuhan, there is a misfit between the experiences of students in a rationalized, abstract, book culture environment of schooling and the more kaleidoscopic and aestheticized media culture in which they are immersed.

Sherry Turkle, in her 1995 book, Life on the Screen, describes the emergence of personal computer technologies and the novel forms of interaction, identities, and experiences that they are producing. She interprets the shift from big mainframe computers to personal computers as symptomatic of a postmodern shift to an innovative type of computer technology and novel forms of subjectivity and culture. For Turkle, big IBM mainframe computers are bound up with centralization, massification, hierarchy, big government, and corporations, and are thus a symbol for modernity itself. Further, modern computers are connected with mechanistic science that is universalist, rationalist (there is one way to do it), and top-down, with a cult of experts and hierarchy; it is also for Turkle rooted in hard masculine science that is logical and abstract.

By contrast, Turkle claims that personal computers are bound up with a postmodern logic and aesthetics. On her account, postmodern computer technologies are “soft” and “feminine” (e.g., more concrete and ductile), subject to tinkering, more graphic and multimedia, and more expressive, merging art and technology. Whereas modern mainframe computers required highly specialized knowledge and were only accessible to a techno-elite, postmodern personal computers are “userfriendly” and lend themselves to experimental activity and promote creative and multifaceted selves. Personal computers thus nourish a postmodern culture of the iconic surface, for while old modern computers required depth-oriented thinking and in-depth technological know-how to get behind the screen, current computers operate on the surface, requiring only that one point and click to navigate cyberspace.

Furthermore, personal computers, in Turkle’s analysis, enable a more decentralized, individualist, and variegated culture that can generate postmodern selves—multiple, fragmented, constructed and provisional, subject to experiment and change. “Windows” for Turkle is the privileged metaphor for postmodern subjectivity—dispersed, decentered, and constructed. Computer software windows open the subject not only to the work world of texts and word processing, but also to the emerging realms of simulation, cyberspace, and interactive multimedia culture.

A Prescription For Education

From these postmodern perspectives, education needs to be reconstructed to overcome the divisions between students’ everyday life in a media and computer culture, and to generate new literacies that will enable students to interact in the contemporary world. Allan and Carmen Luke, in their 2001 article “Adolescence Lost/Childhood Regained,” argue that broad-ranging and robust new pedagogies are needed to grasp the changing social and psychological conditions of life in a globalized, high-tech, and digitized world. They also argue that dramatic transformations of education are necessary to create subjects and practices appropriate to a new global society, digitized culture, and world of new identities, social relations, and cultural forms.

Indeed, some educators have been arguing for a reconstruction of education based on developing new literacies to engage new technologies variously described as multiliteracies, multiple literacies, or multiple techno literacies. Projects for a postmodern reconstruction of education also build on Dewey’s pedagogy, and particularly his calls for the democratization of education to produce more robust democratic societies.

Ironically, during the opening years of the third millennium when postmodern critiques of modern education were widely circulated and reconstructive programs were being advanced, the Bush administration in the United States was pushing a program predicated on standardized testing, focusing on print literacy and mathematics, and generally reproducing what critics believed to be problematic aspects of modern education. However, in an era of continuous technological development and the emergence of new technologies, critiques of modern education will persist and new proposals for the postmodern reconstruction of education will continue to circulate.

Bibliography:

Cazden, C., et al. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 60–92.
Kahn, R., & Kellner, D. (2006). Reconstructing technoliteracy: A multiple literacies approach. In J. R. Dakers (Ed.), Defining technological literacy (pp. 253–274). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kellner, D. (1998). Multiple literacies and critical pedagogy in a multicultural society. Educational Theory, 48(1), 103–122.
Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2005). Toward critical media literacy: Core concepts, debates, organization, and policy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26(3), 369–386.
Luke, A. A., & Luke, C. (2001). Adolescence lost/childhood regained: On early intervention and the emergence of the techno-subject. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 1(1), 91–120.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: Signet Books.
Snyder, I. (Ed.). (2002). Silicon literacies. London: Routledge.
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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