Postmodernist Philosophy Paper, Intro to Education, Klein

Education is never a perfect process. And though we as teachers and humans continuously
attempt to make it better, we may never find the perfect educational model. The postmodernist
philosophy attempts to overcome this difficulty by presenting not just a model of education, but
also a way to think about things that is self-correcting. Thus the question to be asked of
postmodernism is not What does a postmodernist education look like? but is instead, How do
we make our teaching and learning more postmodernist? (Parker, p. 142, 1997)
When we took the surveys in our class to determine our initial educational philosophy
association, I found that I was both a postmodernist and an experimentalist. This echoes almost
perfectly the two different parts of my upbringing. I was, after all, raised by an artist-teacher and
a scientist-politician. All the times that I have worked with students so far in my career, I have
used a more experimentalist philosophy with them. This is in large part because, simply put, the
postmodernist philosophy is very difficult to understand. Although I didnt know to use the word
postmodern for my thoughts on education at the time, I felt that experimentalism and the way its
ideas said I should work with students was not enough.
The purpose of experimentalist education is to teach students to become rational thinkers, and
to constantly hone their thinking. This must be done through the incorporation of new knowledge
by analysis and experimentation. Experimentalist education focuses on the experience that the
students have, in that learning by doing is far more effective. The world cannot be taken for
granted, and so must be tested. Experimentalist education also is based on the idea that
instead of teaching students what to think, we teach students how to think. I was raised in a
montessori school, so I have experienced this educational philosophy first hand for many of my
formative years. It left me with an effective system of thinking which I built myself that I can use
to incorporate new information, but it did not prepare me for the other forms of teaching in high
school, and it did not allow me to pursue creative deconstructive analysis. This means that
although experimentalist teaching gave me a good education by many counts, it did not provide

the basis of a deep understanding of that learning and of the inequalities that it was based on. I
did not have the tools or the mindset to look critically at the ideas that were the foundation of my
education. We were taught to accept conclusions at face value, and digging deeper, while not
discouraged, was not encouraged as much as I think it should have been. The problem with
taking experimental results as true is that the perspective you are viewing from can influence
whether you believe the outcome of an experiment was successful or not. ...experimentalist
philosophy teaches students to analyze, criticize, select between alternatives, and propose
solutions based on analysis and selection. (Grant and Gillette, p. 323, 2006) While this process
of applying the scientific principles to education can be effective, it will frequently overlook the
problems that postmodernism brings to light. Although acting as a scientist can get a teacher far,
sometimes they must be an artist too.
Postmodernism educational philosophy questions the meaning of teaching, it holds that we
cannot teach students how to think just as we cannot teach what to think. It looks at each
concept from the basis that knowledge, and the systems for understanding it, are constructed.
Postmodernism argues that such assumptions [about how the social world is constructed] must
be examined because they are often grounded in relations that favor some and not others.
(Grant and Gillette, p.327, 2006) This means that even those things which we as a human race
hold to be universally true may instead be only the most convenient way for us to categorize
and share our perspectives of the world around us. Postmodernism, because it questions the
nature of knowledge, is very difficult to define. Ironically, one of the most concise definitions of
postmodernism can be seen in a savage and rather vapid critique of postmodernist education.
Postmodernism is the philosophy which believes that truth does not exist or is unknowable.
Truth is viewed as being relative to the culture Truth is relative, not universal. (Quist, Allen, p.
1) Please take note that the author of the article also wrote an article on dinosaurs co-existing
with humans, so while their definitions of postmodern are fairly well-made, the conclusions of
the article are highly questionable. Postmodernism originated with Art and Philosophy

movements coming together in a post-marxist era. Sadly, this means that most intellectual
discussion of postmodernism concerns these two domains and rarely talks about education.
The [postmodernist] artist and [postmodernist] writer, then, are working without rules in order to
formulate the rules of what will have been done. (Lyotard, p.82, 1984) The postmodernist
teacher must similarly work with students and without rules as to what can and cannot be asked
in order to find their own system of understanding the world that is free from cultural
assumptions. Whether in art or writing or education, it is important to question these
assumptions because there is a strong relationship between power and our most basic
assumptions. The logical conclusion of all these definitions of postmodernism is that by
examining and asking questions of the basic assumptions we make that underlie our decisions,
we can begin also to unpack the reasons why those decisions might favor one group over
another, and hopefully then work to change our assumptions to reflect our new understanding.
To accomplish this, postmodernist teachers see learners as humans coming into the classroom
with a wealth of experiences, beliefs, and knowledge. Without having assumptions to challenge
in the first place, students in a postmodern classroom would have to be told how to think,
instead of brought down a line of questioning of the thinking already in place. Thus it is critical
that the postmodernist teacher learn from their students. Student experiences from outside the
classroom are brought to light and examined, giving students the tools they need to question
their own and others cultural assumptions later in life.
I think that my educational philosophy is a mix of experimentalism and postmodernism. I see
postmodernism as a way of thinking and experimentalism as a tool to help that thinking. This
means that my day to day ideas about teaching are more experimentalist, but throughout
discussion with students I want to work to show that there are multiple perspectives and that the
issues we talk about are not only complex but intertwined with societal forces. I think that,
because of its nature, postmodernist teaching is difficult to use in day to day schooling.
However, we cannot simply revert to teaching students how to think, as experimentalism would

have. By using experimentalism as a tool, I would like to create a more traditionally accepted
democratic environment that has progressivism as its core while still using postmodern thought
to make every discussion and project an insight into the assumptions that are underneath our
logic, so that students can have the chance to fully build their own methods of thinking that are
unique and independent, but based on a wealth of knowledge and experiences. In my teaching
as part of this curriculum and otherwise, I would like postmodernist philosophy to allow me to
inspire students to keep asking why, to question the assumptions that are so commonly the
basis of our world understanding. I think postmodernism in this way can be an extremely
valuable tool for teachers to take into consideration. By experimenting with postmodernist
discussion and socratic dialogue, teachers such as myself can lead the students into asking
themselves if the assumptions of our culture are correct, and bring diverse perspectives into the
discussion that might have otherwise been left out.
I love the way John Dewey wrote about his classroom. Dewey was an experimentalist, but I
would argue that he incorporated elements of a postmodernist philosophy into his work, even
though postmodernism did not exist when he conducted his work. Deweys experimental side
was shown throughout his classrooms in the Chicago normal school, where the scientific
method was practiced not only in student activities, but also in the evaluation and training of
teachers. Deweys use of postmodern thought was prevalent as well, mostly in his creation of a
learning space for the students and in the roles of teachers as less lecturers and more guides.
Dewey was a proponent of having students participate in and construct their own knowledge in
the classroom, one of the talking points of postmodernist education. To learn from ones
students is clearly a hallmark of Deweys philosophy of education (Schubert, p.79, 2006)
Despite this, there was little deconstruction of fundamental knowledge in Deweys classrooms,
making Dewey much more experimentalist than postmodernist. Nonetheless, the elements of
postmodernism are there in his work.

As part of my postmodernist beliefs, I feel that a students mind is by nature of being human an
amalgamation of the beliefs and ideals that they hold as a result of the upbringing and as a
result of their experiences. Just as with any teacher, including myself, those experiences are
likely to contain a cultural bias that has no rooted explanation or driving memory behind it, but
instead originates with the cultural consciousness. These are the cultural biases we must work
to undo. Often those may be rooted in the very systems of education and living that the student
is a part of every day, making difficult work. This makes one of our jobs as teachers to be
showing students that any knowledge they receive is in many ways incomplete by its nature. We
will never have a truly complete or thorough explanation of our world, and there are
extrapolations that one must make because of that, but it is morally superior and socially
responsible to seek out as much of the picture as possible before making those extrapolations.
Oftentimes the best way to get this data is not through wide reaching nets of study but through
small, exhaustive, examples spread out across the system you are examining. In a classroom,
this means that it can not only be easier but more effective to have students choose to share
stories pertaining to the topic at hand as opposed to asking them all the same specific questions
about an event. This is because, by giving each student the opportunity to share their story, you
get a more diverse picture of the topic, and because the students will be sharing with each
other, there will be a greater sense of community. Sometimes experimentation is needed
because through experimentation, you show the response of the system of a stimuli, not just the
observation of the system as it exists. Experimentalism can be shown in a classroom in many
ways, but one of my favorite is to allow students the chance to aid in the construction of their
own curricula democratically, giving the students experience in group decisions and in modes of
government. By grounding each experiment done in the first principles of postmodern thought, I
can bring my students to understand the nature of their world and what they as individuals bring
to the table. In this way, experimentalism and postmodernism fit together well. Both processes
highlight the need of the individual to analyze and question lessons in the context of their own

knowledge and deeply held beliefs. Students are not blank slates, and so their knowledge and
experiences should be brought into the classroom. This idea that we can capitalize on students
experiences is more stereotypically postmodern but is also embraced by experimentalism.
Additionally, as teachers, it is critical that we learn how to take advantage of everything each
student gives us so that we may better teach them. Since students may be out of your sight for
up to 22 hours of the day, there are very few situations in which calling on those experiences
from outside of class would be detrimental.
To a postmodernist point of view, all knowledge is connected intrinsically. If you pursue a certain
subject far enough, you will run quickly into other subjects as well in the pursuit of learning more
in the original. By presenting the concepts taught in class through an experiential,
experimentalist framework, a teacher can give the students a greater scaffolding for them to ask
questions and branch out into the subjects cousins, those small spaces where the students
interest is held by a related topic, where intrinsically motivated learning thrives. This can easily
be done through projects, because the physical and thus multifaceted nature of projects tends
to highlight the interconnectedness of all knowledge.
An experimentalist-postmodernist classroom such as the one I intend to create is perhaps
difficult to imagine. It involves a greater number of physical project-based assignments than
most. It relies on the students to play a democratic, creative role in actively altering the
coursework to fit their interests and preferred learning styles. This is critical because at the end
of the day, each individual teacher can only teach to one or two learning styles at a time, but
there are many students. For this reason as well, the lessons on the course material would be
more student-led, and the teacher would stand by as a guide and reference. Students would
learn by experiencing and experimenting with physical materials, but would also work together
to push the boundaries of each experiment. With both literature and with other subjects,
students would be Strongly MIS-reading the text, reading with the intention of causing trouble;
seeing all assertions, practices and positions as textual (Parker, p.143, 1997) or in the case of

other subjects, seeing them as contextual. The classroom would revolve around a loose,
student-led and student-driven structure, being somewhere in between a democratic classroom
and a free learning space.
I hope for myself that through my study of these two forms of educational philosophy that I am
able to somehow walk this balance beam standing between firmly experimentalist and firmly
postmodernist. I truly believe it is the best way I have found to provide students a foundation for
their future that is social, but will still stand on its own. In our modern culture of collaboration
dominated by strong independent personalities, it is more important than ever.

Parker, Stuart: Reflective Teaching in the Postmodern World: a manifesto for education in
postmodernity, Open University Press, 1997
Grant and Gillette: Learning to Teach Everyones Children: Equity, Empowerment, and
Education that is Multicultural, 2006
Quist, Allen: How Teachers Can Recognize Postmodernism in School Textbooks, 2005
Lyotard, Jean-Francois: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis;
University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 71-82
Schubert, William Henry: Teaching John Dewey as a Utopian Pragmatist While Learning from
my Students, Purdue University Press, Education and Culture, Volume 22, Number 1, 2006,
pp.78-83