This weekend, French thinker Jacques Derrida, father of the literary method known as "deconstruction," died of pancreatic cancer. His wide-ranging influence on intellectual life on this planet even trickled down into K-12 education, where it has inspired some of our wackier and less responsible pedagogical theorists.
For Derrida, nothing external to language could be truly conveyed through language. That is, words refer not to things, but to other words, a view that undermines the traditional assumption that literature directly reflects and interprets reality. His dissections of important texts in the Western tradition were undeniably the work of a powerful intellect. However, critics often accused him of willful obscurity, nihilistic punning, and other sordid crimes against the Western tradition. One of Derrida's own descriptions of the deconstructive method may serve as evidence for the prosecution:
And "deconstructions," which I prefer to say in the plural, has no doubt never named a project, a method, or a system. Especially not a philosophical system. Within contexts always very well defined, it is one of the possible names used to designate, in sum by metonymy, what occurs, or cannot manage to occur, namely a certain dislocation which in effect reiterates itself regularly - and wherever there is something rather than nothing: within what is classically called the texts of classical philosophy, of course and for example, but also within any "text," in the general sense which I try to justify for this word, that is to say in plain experience, in the social, historical, economic, technical, military, and so on "reality." For instance, the event of the so-called Gulf War is a powerful, spectacular, and tragic condensation of these deconstructions.
Phew! Sounds like a page from the Education Policy Analysis Archives. And in fact, the jargon-loaded absurdity of much contemporary education scholarship owes a great deal to Derrida and his fellow French web-spinners. But their influence is more than rhetorical. These post-structuralist thinkers, Derrida perhaps most prominent among them, are godparents of the notion that K-12 education is primarily about inculcating in the young a desire for social activism and an awareness of how society is shot through with oppression. The notion that children need to decode the narratives, hidden in all literary works, that reinforce society's underlying power structures, is a bastard child of these French thinkers - and is alive and well in our ed schools.
To be sure, at some level all pedagogy is political; Plato covered this 2,500 years ago. However, a more moderate (and honest) approach, and one infinitely more helpful to children, would train teachers to focus on facts, deal carefully with controversial topics, and understand that grappling with texts should be taught as a skill, not a means for social action.
Derrida probably would have scoffed at some of the ways in which his ideas have been co-opted by education professors. But bastard children are children nonetheless, and such theories must therefore be counted as part of Derrida's legacy.