1 Schooling the Future*: An Investigation of Schools, Students and Postmodern Culture. Richard Bates Deakin University Australia 3217 *This paper derives in part from an ARC funded project 'Schooling the Future' involving Chris Bigum, Lindsay Fitzclarence, Bill Green and Rob Walker Schooling the Future: An Investigation of Schools, Students and Postmodern Culture. Mass education in its recent forms has been a modernist project par excellence, with its stress on rationality, individual autonomy and the unified self, national histories, hierarchical organisation, and progress.....A feature of postmodernist styles is that they are the styles of life of the young: cinema, television, MTV, fashion, rock music, dance - cultural forms which are expressive channels of a generation. Educators ignore this life world at their peril. (Gilbert, 1990) Schooling the Future is a project concerned with exploring the differences that may exist between schooling as a modernist project and contemporary youth cultures as expressions of a postmodern consciousness. It centres around the possible disjunction between the 'message systems' of schools (curriculum, pedagogy, evaluation and administration) and the subjectivities of postmodern student culture. In particular it is a quasi-ethnographic study of student responses to the contemporary forms of schooling (especially those focused on the introduction of the VCE) contextualised within accounts of students varying cultural styles. Modernism and postmodernism. Just as Nietzsche once proclaimed the death of God, postmodernists proclaim the demise of the grand narratives of modernism. The modernist project directed to the construction of unifying epistemologies, metaphysics and aesthetics which would link into a coherent explanation of the universe is dissolved by the postmodernist vision of finite, locally determined understandings rooted in cultural pluralism and in fragmenting organisational forms. Postmodernism takes many forms, is in itself a pluralistic critique of modernism. As a result there is something of a contradiction in adopting a postmodernist position while simultaneously attempting to provide a coherent narrative which would explain postmodernism as a movement. However, a number of characteristics of postmodernism can be delineated and will act as a basis for understanding the problematic position of schools caught between the modernist narratives which have historically shaped their purposes as unifying social institutions and the postmodernist deconstruction of those narratives and purposes. As Dunn suggests: 'Defining postmodernism in relation to modernism has become a familiar operation. From the universal to the particular, from unity to disunity, from depth to surface, from originals to copies, from works to texts - in such paired abstract terms postmodernism has been posited as a departure from modernist epistemology and aesthetics.' (Dunn, 1991:113) In areas of aesthetics, ethics and epistemology postmodernism attacks the strain towards coherence and unity that typifies modernism. Relativism and plurality are the underlying features of the postmodern world. Previous hierarchies of taste, authority, power, are challenged and relativised through a redefinition of power as a problem of representation in discourse. Rather than truth establishing regimes of power (through the subjection of authority to evidence and law governed behaviour) power is argued to establish particular regimes of truth. Rather than hierachies of 'taste' being established on the basis of privileged access to cultural objects the universal availability of copies (simulacra) has democratised cultural discourse. The mechanisms of postmodernism are facilitated by processes of commodification which have resulted from the productive capacities of modern capitalism. These capacities have shifted attention from production to consumption while developing forms of communication and information exchange which remove constraints of time and place. The result, as Agnes Heller argues, is that 'Postmodernism as a cultural movement (not as an ideology, theory or program) has a simple enough message: anything goes' (1990:7). The unification of tastes, values and identifications that was previously seen as an inevitable outcome of modernism and of the mass consumer society appears to be contradicted by the experience of postmodern culture: 'What has indeed emerged is not the standardisation and unification of consumption, but rather the enormous pluralization of tastes, practices, enjoyments and needs' (Heller, 1990:10). One effect of this shift in cultural form is that the older, modernist, constellations of interest that were represented by classes (another hierarchy) become diffuse and possibly unsustainable. .... a problem presents itself with respect to this infinite variety, this pluralization of the ways of life, this demise of self-complacent and ethnocentric class cultures. Hannah Arendt, and others, have stressed that social classes are necessary for the conduct of rational politics. Classes can give birth to institutions (political organizations which represent their interests). Representative governments grow out of class society. If classes are on the wane, if cultures are becoming pluralized to the degree of total particularization, is a meaningful, rational decision-making process still possible? (Heller, 1990:11). Most importantly, and a matter we shall return to later, Heller argues that We are left only with corporations organised according to functions, and corporations do not represent the interests of ways of life as a whole, but rather the interests of particular functions. Thus, societies based on corporate decision making can easily be described as 'mass societies' despite cultural pluralization. (Heller, 1990:11) Schools in a postmodern society. Schools, at least those that have resulted from the development of mass education, are indeed class related institutions tied directly to the need of complex technological societies to produce hierarchies of technical knowledge and abilities as well as political and economic commitments - skills and motivations of quite particular kinds. However, if, as the postmodernists argue, classes are on the wane and cultures are becoming more and more pluralised, how can the modernist project of an education tied to the production of technical knowledge and particular economic and political commitments continue to be effective? Put more directly, but more conventionally, specifically in relation to the impact of technological developments, Decker Walker outlines the problem I think the greatest challenge these developments pose for schools is institutional adaptation. All social change is stressful for schools because schools are universal institutions charged to serve the children of those who want change and those who resist it. To ignore social change places schools at the risk of irrelevance. Schools are already perceived as removed from reality (witness talk of schoolboy illusions and ivory towers). Too much distance and they lose public support. On the other hand, making major changes is difficult and risky too. As governmental institutions, schools are obliged to follow the mandates of elected officials, and governmental direction is notoriously slow and undependable. Schools are also bound by contracts with their teachers which prevent them restructuring themselves to meet the challenges of a changing environment. In short, public elementary and secondary schools are both slow and difficult to change. Yet technological developments are transforming the society the schools serve, and the schools cannot afford to ignore these changes. This is a cruel dilemma, but one that must be faced. Walker, 1985: But what is the nature of this technologically driven change in the environment of education and what is its possible impact on education? Some of the effects are clearly in the experiences of technology that students come to outside the school. The most pervasive set of technologies with which students are actively engaged are information technologies. As Sachs, Smith and Chant (1990) have shown, teenagers typically spend between 4 and 7 hours a day involved with electronic media (TV ,Video and Radio) , are surprisingly heavy consumers of magazines, books and newspapers (despite popular mythology) and have ready access to computers as well as attending cinemas a couple of times a month. The importance of such access and availability is in the social usage of these information technologies and their use in the creation of subjectivities. For: ...information technologies in the hands of the young are the creators of languages. They are the means by which the capacity to invent new relationships with oneself and others are increased. Information technologies and the young are creators of cultural materials. (Sachs, Smith and Chant 1990:5) This is well understood in the worlds of commerce and entertainment where particular representations are made in ways which form elements in the construction of adolescent identity. Role models, languages, consumption patterns (fashion, food, places, entertainment, music) are all presented in certain ways through the information technologies. The problem for schools is that such developments construct an alternative and at first sight more powerful pedagogy than that available in the school. Lundgren (1987) refers to this as a split between the two pedagogies of schools on the one hand and and commerce and entertainment on the other. However, as Sachs, Smith and Chant point out, the pedagogy of the school if it is constructed in ways which transcend the mere experience of information technology can provide a sense of meaning which subjects the experience of the media to processes of analysis and contextualisation. As Palmer (1986) suggests, schools may well provide one of the few places where children are forced to withdraw for a time from a constant flux of electronically produced sounds and images. This point is reinforced by Decker's observation that: The students we serve in school...are children of the television age. They come to school knowledgeable about the world, at least as portrayed on TV, and fluent in processing visual and auditory information, but confused about "what's really real." (Walker, 1985) This confusion, can, presumably, be taken as a starting point for a pedagogy which is concerned with explanation rather than persuasion. The impact of the electronic media and information technology in general is at once unifying and differentiating. While some presentations appear to provide 'core' experiences which act as points of contact between members constructing similar subjectivities, languages and cultures, the very diversity of content and mode of communication and therefore of the languages or discourses that can be derived allows the possibility of celebrations of distinction between groups, of the construction of subjectivity over and against the subjectivities of others. Walker again: They have grown up plugged into electronic networks that offer them excitements not available at home or in school; media where their hopes and dreams, their fears and concerns, are expressed for their consumption by an industry and a culture - a child culture and an adolescent culture with its own heroes and villains, its own mores - tailored to and tailoring their tastes With the result that In some ways the children of the 1980's are more homogeneous, reflecting their exposure to the uniformities of the electronic media and the decline in influence of familial and ethnic factors. But since these trends have affected some children more than others, they come to us in some ways a more diverse lot than before. Increased homogeneity and simultaneous increased heterogeneity is one of the paradoxes celebrated by postmodernism and it is clearly one of the issues faced by contemporary schools. Technology, culture and pedagogy. One of the outcomes of attempts to introduce technological literacy regarding the information culture into the curriculum is a major public conflict between representatives of modernism, and its hierarchies of taste, style and knowledge, and representatives of postmodern culture where 'anything goes'. This is particularly well exemplified in the attempts of some 'authorities' to keep the study of popular culture out of the schools and to quarantine the curriculum in ways that preserve the grand narratives or great traditions of the past. A recent report published by the Institute of Public Affairs argues that as a result of contemporary changes to the curriculum (Students) ... go into young adulthood much less informed than they need be, both about the world they live in and their place in it. They know nothing about human continuity and what other people in other times have done with their lives. They will know about television, video, rock music and computer games. But none of that is a substitute for good reading. Reading is a much more active, and instructive pursuit, as well as a source of tremendous enjoyment throughout life. (There is) a phenomenal, overwhelming bias in favour of contemporary literature - as opposed to Dickens, Tolstoy and other classical authors- which was occurring partly from ignorance, partly because contemporary books were more accessible, partly because it meant less work for teachers. The Australian, March 19, 1990 In particular the curriculum guidelines for Queensland and Victoria were criticised on these grounds. Similarly the conservatism of teachers and their socialisation into the modernist project can inhibit changes in the curriculum that reflect fundamental changes in science and technology towards a less linear and coherent model of 'reality. For instance, considerable conservatism is apparent in the responses of teachers to VCE mathematics in Victoria. As Mousley (1991) reports, the compulsory project on Fractals and Chaos Theory was regarded by many teachers as radical and inappropriate. However, there seems little doubt that the shift towards non-linear geometry involved was quite in keeping with changes in the application of mathematics to a wide number of fields that were previously unexplored because of the limitations of conventional (linear) geometry. As we noted earlier, however, the battle is not simply between a modernist culture unified by hierarchies of taste, authority and class and by the promise of a coherent epistemology and ontology and postmodernist cultures of the particular, local and incommensurable. If culture is no longer a cohesive social force we are left with the functional purposes of the corporation as the binding matter of mass society. As technology, and in particular information technology, is produced and shaped through corporate structures what effect does this have on the school and its articulation with adolescent cultures? Bigum, in a specific analysis of the introduction of computer education in schools suggests that '...what has gone on in the name of integrating computers into the work of schools has actually been the reconstruction of schools and schooling largely for commercial gain (1991:1). His argument is based on the premiss that a discourse of educational computing was constructed by the corporations which linked computing skills with access to high tech jobs in an increasingly high tech society. This was despite the evidence that high tech societies produced remarkably few high tech jobs and despite the evidence that computer software and hardware was driven by the corporate logic of deskilling and the consequent casualisation and degradation of labour. Nonetheless, schools were caught up in this romantic view of technological progress so that The problem for schools was defined in terms of how best to accommodate and support the growth of computing, not in terms of supporting and protecting the humans who worked there (Bigum, 1991:3) The massive shift of scarce resources into the provision of substantial (but insufficient) quantities of hardware was a substantial invasion of the curricular, pedagogical, evaluative and administrative message systems of schools. Schools in this respect have become subject to the logic of the corporation. In view of the growth of the infrastructures for computers in schools from nothing in the early eighties to a significant consumer of human, capital and recurrent resources of schools and school systems by the early nineties, it is possible to assert that schools and school systems have been massively reconstructed to accommodate the new information technologies. Importantly, the reconstruction continues today as each new wave of high technology product spills from the hold of an American or Japanese container on our wharves. (Bigum, 1991:3) While Bigum goes on to argue that this corporate high tech invasion is somewhat offset by the complexity and surprising outcomes of an increasingly intimate computer-user interface, Wexler (1987) argues that such changes in schools are part of the institutional reorganisation of education. While this is in part the result of postmodernist tendencies in culture - towards cultural pluralism and relativism, Wexler also argues that such tendencies make the project of New Right groups so much easier to achieve. Indeed, the displacement of cultural institutions by markets which both corporatise and commodify cultural forms and the transformation of public institutions into organisational forms which further the project of corporatisation and capital accumulation provides a context for the reorganisation of education. The current perception of crisis is an early phase in a larger process of the institutional reorganisation of education. As a preface to reorganization, it works to destroy the common national republican culture which the schools helped to create during the nineteenth century. There occurs a dismantling of the institutional infrastructure that standardised and solidified national culture through the social relations of twentieth century education. Both tendencies within the rightward movement, social integration and market, cultural restoration and the reassertion of capital, are represented in the actions of these movements. There appears almost to be a division of labour: attack common culture on the one hand; undercut and dismantle organizational finances and forms on the other. Specifically this means an attack on school curricula and budgets. (Wexler, 1987:67) In the post modern world everything is commodifed and subject to markets. Culture and civic identity which were the cornerstones of the modernist school practice are reduced to articles of consumption in a society where ...the sheer excess of the marketplace diminishes and obscures the value of everything, enabling exchange value to become a universal criterion of culture. (Dunn, 1991:123) Postmodern society, schooling and students. Clearly the simple vision of a modernist school confronting a postmodern student is too simple an account of a situation that is changing in all of its aspects. While information technologies may have created significant changes in the cultural contexts of adolescence, their impact is variable. Similarly, while mass schooling was constructed under a modernist impulse postmodernist tendencies in the cultural sphere and pressures towards commodification and privatisation to comply with absorption into the corporate marketplace are also reshaping the operations of schools. Schooling the Future is a project that attempts to portray the impact of these various transformations on the construction of student subjectivities. Early data suggest that students react in diverse and complex ways to these various transformations. There are some surprising continuities for some students. The importance of family, a sustained interest in 'people'; a continued commitment to worthwhile work in the face of high youth unemployment; a continued belief in the possibility of a worthwhile future. There are also disaffections, the promise of a secure future as a reward for effort has been broken; the relevance of the cultural curriculum of the school to particular localised futures is questioned; the social conformity of the school is rejected. Many of these early observations are contradictory. What we do not yet know is how such reactions are produced, structured, culturally supported, how central they are to the subjectivities of particular students and groups of students. Are the out of school cultural experiences of 'skegs', 'bogons', 'gothics', 'yuppies', 'trends' related to various informational media constructions? Are the 'try-hards' really captured by the school? What are the various balances between individuality, social/cultural identity, media identifications, school activities and how are they arrived at? What transformation points occur in the development of these subjectivities? How do the transformations in the message systems of schools interact ? Do different schools interact differently with the cultural identities of adolescents and with the information media? It is simply too early to say. What we do have is the early emergence of indications of substantial variations in the control of time, space and resources. How these are structured we do not yet know. Yet some events do seem to pivotal points for the intersection of many of these factors. One such event is the "Rock Eisteddfod". This event is clearly a central aspect of the life of the school, of the identity and subjectivity of students and a substantial experience of the substance, organisation and impact of information technology and commercialism. It may also turn out to be symbolic of the transformation of culture into a commodifed form appropriate to the competitive demands of the market. Further conversations will no doubt allow us to understand these issues rather more clearly. The other event that appears to be pivotal for everyone is the introduction of the VCE with its attempts to transform not only curricular content but also the pedagogy, organisation and administration of the final years of schooling. Initial indications are that it has indeed transformed not only the subjectivities of teachers, parents and students but has also led to significant restructuring of time and a reordering of social and cultural priorities. Again, data collection is in the early stages and the precise delineation of these issues cannot yet be portrayed. Our early work is well summarised by Fitzclarence: In summary then, the work of the Project focuses on the emergence of what is postulated to be a distinctively new kind of student identity, in accordance with decisively changed and changing socio-economic and cultural conditions, and a new social form organised around electronic culture and the principles of information and image. Within a general concern for 'schooling the future', understood in essence as a matter of teaching with and for difference, research has begun on the task of recognising and understanding contemporary school populations in terms of postmodern subjectivity, and hence the emergence of a new kind of student-person which changing capacities, desires, uncertainties and priorities. These are early days yet, but we believe that already we can see new possibilities emerging for educational theory and practice from the work to date as well as the basis for a general critique of postmodern educational culture. (Fitzclarence et al 1991: 5-6) References. Bigum, Chris (1991) Schools for Cyborgs: Educating Aliens. Paper presented to the Australian Computers in Education Conference Sept 22-25. Dunn, Robert (1991) 'Postmodernism; Populism, Mass Culture and the Avant Garde. Theory, Culture and Society (8) 111-135 Fitzclarence, L., R.Bates, C.Bigum, W.Green and R.Walker (1991) Schooling the Future: An Ethnographic Account of Information Culture and Student Experience in the Context of the VCE. Unpublished paper, Deakin University Gilbert, R (1990) Citizenship, Education and Postmodernity. Paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Researchers in Education, Sydney, November. Heller, Agnes (1990) 'Existentialism, Alienation and Postmodernism: ' Cultural Movements as Vehicles of Change in Patterns of Everyday Life'. pp 1-13 in A Milner, P Thompson and C.Worth (eds) Postmodern Conditions. New York/ Oxford/ Munich. Berg Publishers. Lundgren, U. (1987) New Challenges for Teachers and their Education. Strasbourg. Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education. Mousley, J. (1991) Chaos in the VCE in. K Clements (ed) Whither Mathematics. Melbourne. Mathematics Association of Victoria. Palmers, P. (1986) The Lively Audience Sydney. Allen and Unwin. Sachs, J., Smith, R., and Chant, D. (1990) Bombarding:Adolescents Use of Information Technology in Australia and Scotland. Metro Magazine 82:2-6 Walker, Decker (1985) Curriculum and Technology. Ch 6 in Current Thoughts on Curriculum: 1985 ASCD Yearbook. Alexandria, VA. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Wexler, P. (1987) Social Analysis of Education: After the New Sociology. London. Routledge & Kegan Paul.