Two weeks into the semester I am being driven crazy by one of my subjects. It's an education subject called Concepts of Childhood. What we are being taught is interesting enough, it's just the way it is being taught - I have never come across a subject so dominated by postmodernism.
Constantly we are reminded there there is no single truth, and we spent the first hour of class looking at ambiguous images and interpreting them so that we could see "everyone sees things differently, and that is what is most important". All the lecturers keep insisting that they don't want to "force us to believe" anything and every time they express their views they have to qualify it saying something like, "this is just what I believe, and you may think differently, but..." or "this is what I believe as a white, middle-class Australian, but you may be have a different background and may believe differently...".
The worst example was when the lecturer was introducing us to the theories of a behaviour psychologist called B.F. Skinner. She explained to us, "I don't agree with his views, so I am trying very hard to be objective, but it isn't easy. I see his theories about raising children as...well..dangerous. But if you agree with Skinner that is fine." I was a perplexed - how can you see certain views as being both dangerous and fine? I think the only way is if you actually had no concern for those who would be endangered by the implementation of these views. The lecturer was trying to tolerate other views; trying not to presume she had an exclusive hold to what was right, but at the same time is was clear that certain all views aren't equal - some lead to joy, some to destruction.
Worryingly everyone else in the classroom seems untroubled by this. Actually the class seems just as eager to promote postmodernism, with one girl reminded me that "everything is relative" when a comment of mine suggested absolute truth.
I thought I had seen the worst of it when I was studying Anthropology and we were told, "you can't judge culture because that is presuming your own truth is exclusively true" - but even in Anthropology relativism was seen to be problematic and quite aggressively critiqued. In Concepts of Childhood it is an unquestioned assumption. Should be an interesting semester...
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2 comments:
In some ways I would consider myself more culturally relative of than you but I too find it soo frustrating. Especially when said people are hypocritical and condemn a certain cultural practice, which for some reason is bizarrely wrong in all circumstances.
Apart from further developing the theory of operant conditioning, what else did Skinner achieve? I've only learnt about him from a psychological perspective.
He was a radical behaviouralist and thought that humans didn't have any autonomy. He did lots of experiments with pigeons, training them to do actions through positive reinforcement. He basically argued that you should raise children in just the same way.
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