Posted on 09/21/2005 4:54:55 PM PDT by naturalman1975
SCHOOLS that abandoned traditional English programs in favour of "critical literacy" were trying to make students agents of social change, Cardinal George Pell warned yesterday.
In a speech in Canberra yesterday, the Catholic archbishop said some schools were placing too much focus on texts that normalised "moral and social disorder".
"While parents wonder why their children have never heard of the Romantic poets, Yeats or the Great War poets, and never ploughed through a Bronte, Orwell or Dickens novel, their children are engaged in analysing a variety of 'texts', including films, magazines, advertisements and even road signs as part of critical literacy," Cardinal Pell declared.
Debate has raged in recent months about the educational value of the critical literacy program, which encourages students to approach all texts - from books through to television commercials - from the point of view of the possible suspect motives behind it.
It has been described by advocates in the education sector as a "radical educational idea" that openly politicises the classroom.
Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson, who has been scathing about the ideologically driven nature of critical literacy, said last month its proponents were "doing significant damage to our future".
Cardinal Pell also criticised the political agendas involved in the critical literacy approach.
As part of a broader attack on "relativism" - the idea that nothing is absolute - he told the National Press Club: "Examining how relativism in the form of school-based postmodernism proposes to make students into 'agents of social change' makes it apparent very quickly that there is another agenda at work underneath it all.
"Generally accepted understandings of family, sexuality, maleness, femaleness, parenthood and culture are treated as 'dominant discourses' that impose and legitimise injustice and intolerance. These dominant discourses are then undermined by a disproportionate focus on 'texts' which normalise moral and social disorder."
Cardinal Pell said the trend had gone furthest in Queensland - although he noted the state Minister for Education had recently called a halt to it - Western Australia and Tasmania.
"My generation has had the benefit of learning from the tradition, and thus we can critique it. To give youngsters all critique and no foundation leaves them rudderless," he said.
"School syllabuses or university courses in which great works of literature and the study of history are dismissed as 'elitist' or relevant only to the 'dominant ethnic and social group' dismantle the sense of an objective reality in young people," he said.
In a broader attack, Dr Pell warned against the "dictatorship of relativism", a phrase coined by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in an address in Rome just before he was elected to the papacy as Benedict XVI.
Dr Pell said Australians should be aware of "the effects of an increase in the secular-relativist bite into Christianity": previous moral norms society accepted such as standards on lying, breaking promises, assault, abuse and cheating would be vulnerable to revision.
"Conscience would become personal preference - a polite term for 'doing it my way', and clear thinking and past wisdom would be repudiated and ridiculed," he said.
Hard as it was to believe Australia would ever reject the most fundamental moral principles, "it was hard only 50 years ago to believe we would abort 100,000 babies a year, contemplate men marrying men, killing the sick, experimenting on human embryos."
Wow.
I agree. Someone is pushing for the Pope job in my book.
Radical educational ideas, IMO, are bad ideas.
He's right - I'm a teacher (history and IT in my case) and what I see in the English syllabus is very disturbing. And I teach at an elite private school which is somewhat insulated from the worst excesses of these ideas. We can't ignore them completely because our kids have to do the VCE. But it must be far worse elsewhere.
Yuck. I suppose this could be going on in American secondary schools, as well. I graduated in 1984, after reading dreadful stuff like Dickens and Hardy. I don't remember looking for Dominant Discourses on Maleness, either.
It must be hard for you, not to mention a total drag for the students.
If this stuff weren't sanctioned by a generation of fast-talking French intellectualoids it would be relegated to the ravings of a loony-bin. That is, in fact, where a fellow named Michael Foucault found it in the first place.
I have visions of ten years from now, English teachers abandoning it - and Mathematics teachers starting to base the curriculum on it. Talking about the privileged position of the number one, and so forth (although perhaps even the use of word 'forth' sounding as it does like 'fourth' indicates a dominant discourse of mathematical terms intruding into spoken English...)
Public "education" is the greatest threat to individual freedom that has ever existed. It should be abolished.
Moral Absolutes Ping.
Moral relativity in English class. It's all the same - Emily Dickenson, Shakespeare, Pepsi ads, MTV. No difference. Except actually they say there is a difference - Shakespeare and the like are actually evil since they were white males and part of the patriarchy, whereas MTV is good because it has thugs of color.
Moral relativity is NOT relative. Those who promote it, in all its varying manifestations, actually think themselves a sort of god (or actual God) and they are right, and we are wrong.
Freepmail me if you want on/off this pinglist.
It is, actually, an article of faith among feminist postmodernists that there is such a thing as "women's mathematics" that differs from the, er, dominant discourse in that topic. There is a professor of mathematics on our campus who I heard comment on that one time - a delicate little Chinese lady named Eng. I didn't know she knew language like that. Woulda made a longshoreman blush...
I applaud Cardinal George Pell. He's right! Now what will be done about it?
Critical theory calls attention to itself as a method that can't be critical of itself. It's more an article of faith for the faithless. If Shakespeare were alive today he would would think the French intellectuals were actually a comedy trope.
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