Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Postmodernism-lite: reflections on the recent VCE English debate.

Article Excerpt
Designing school curriculum within a culture of information overload is an unenviable task. If education has always been a contested area, the growth of technology and information creates new dilemmas. The sciences have to balance the use of new technologies with more traditional skills of calculation and understanding. The humanities and social sciences have to choose objects of study from an almost infinite array of choices. In both cases controversy arises whenever traditional forms of learning are challenged: have the sciences lapsed into the techno-sciences? Is media dexterity the same thing as literacy? If this situation is not fraught enough, education is now called upon to supply wider social and cultural 'values' while being increasingly framed within an audit culture that often works against these values. Demands by education ministers for the publication of results, school rankings and that schools publicly display their outcomes reveal a highly instrumental understanding of education. Can the cultivation of value be sustained within such an output-driven and competitive environment? All this, combined with the level of cultural investment in the 'successful' child, makes the design of curriculum a hotly contested area.

However, what always grab the headlines are proposed changes to the subject of English. It is as if English is forced to assume a cultural burden it cannot reasonably bear. Secondary English is supposed to generate literacy skills as well as a sense of history. It is also, importantly, meant to inculcate a sense of civic values in the student. For a long time the great works of literature were seen...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!