Rejecting "Pomo": Another Reason to Homeschool

My post-secondary education has been mostly in the sciences. I hold degrees in Geology, Biology, and now, I am studying in the neurosciences.

Now, some of you--the ones who spent your mornings in English Literature classes and your afternoons playing Frisbee on the Quad while we poor science geeks were in physics labs quantifying the forces on said toy (you know who you are)--might say: "I'm sorry. You missed a lot."

And it is true. I missed the phenomenon called postmodernism--called "pomo" for short, according to Wickepedia. I did not learn it. I do not understand it. I cannot "grok" it. I try not to even think about it.

I know that's an evasion--but we all have our weaknesses.

But yesterday a set of books from Amazon--ordered a week ago by 2-day delivery (don't ask)--arrived. (If you insist on asking, the books were originally dispatched from Coffeyville, KS). One of the books was Who Killed Homer? (WHK) And that is the one that I started to read with my lunch yesterday.

Wow! I almost didn't get my afternoon work done. In fact, I admit that I took some shortcuts.
The book is about the rapid disappearance of an understanding of our culture's classical roots in American education. Publisher's Weekly puts it this way:

"...classicists Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath explain what has been killed, who did it, and why. They rescue the Greeks from postmodernist scholars who disparage the thought and art of these 'dead white European males'..." (paperback back cover).

I haven't finished the book yet, so I don't know if they actually "rescue the Greeks,"* but I did spend some reading time grappling with the problems presented by postmodernism. And now I am actually thinking about it. You know how it is: if you ignore entropy, it only gets worse. But at the same time that I was pretending that postmodernism would go away, or that, at least it did not affect me when I was teaching at the college, high school and elementary level, of course it was. Affecting me--that is.

From my reading about the term postmodernism--admittedly limited--and from the discussion of it in WKH, I will reduce it's complex and (according to Wickepedia) somewhat fluid definition to the essential idea that reality is socially constructed. All of it. In other words, the postmodernists think that Aristotle had it wrong: reality isn't really real. A is not A.

So that's what the classicists, philosophy majors and creative writing afficianados where discussing on the Quad while I was laboring to isolate my unknown by titration in Quantitative Analysis. Damn! I wish I'd have know that someone had revoked reality. I wouldn't have wasted my time determining the unknown amount down to the nearest picoliter. Who cares? It's not real anyway! Let's go play frisbee! Oops. But what if Newton's laws of motion aren't real, either? Better just have a beer.

OK, for you chemists out there, I exagerate. Our titrator was not that precise. In fact it had the disconcerting habit of letting loose more than one drop of reagent at the critical moment, turning the solution pink before we could count the actual drops. Meaning that we had to redo the experiment. From the beginning. And buy the TA the supper he missed because the Dining Hall closed at 7:15 PM. For the non-geeks reading this, that's called "burning the midnight oil." Drat that 1970's technology!

But I digress. Sort of. Because the point I am trying to make here is that a scientist cannot accept this premise of postmodernism. I mean, if reality is socially constructed--which I take to mean that it is agreed upon by a culture--then the Earth ceased rotating around the sun during medieval European times. But only for the Europeans. And only until Galileo. But of course, at the archives of the Roman Catholic church, the earth did not start revolving around the sun until 1993, when church officials remembered that they'd condemned Galileo of heresy all those years ago and cleared him. Maybe they were eager to have seasons again?

I admit that this is a ridiculous argument that takes the "pomo" stance way too far. I got carried away. I'm sorry.

My actual point stands though: a scientist cannot accept that reality is socially constructed.
The job of a scientist is to use experimental and empirical methods to determine how the universe functions. In order to do this, the scientist must start with the idea that the universe operates in a predictable way following universally (get it?) applicable laws. If a scientist wishes to do her job with integrity, she cannot decide to throw out evidence because it does not agree with her (socially constructed) ideas about the world.

I'm sure that a "pomo" advocate would interject here that science is, itself, a socially constructed pursuit with socially constructed rules. And that integrity really doesn't exist. (Or is this last nihilism? Amoralism? Damn--wish I'd have taken that modern philosoply course. But I didn't have time. I was spending hours mucking about with reality in science labs). At the least, the "pomo" would say that integrity is whatever we say it is.

And that brings me to the issue of postmodernism and education. Because, if we say that reality is whatever we agree it is, then nothing is absolute. Not the laws of nature. Not the values of western culture. Justice? Forget it. Right action? It's whatever we say it is.

Talk about the tyranny of the majority!

Those people, those heroes, who stood up against injustice, must have been delusional--after all, they did not accept the socially approved reality. Martin Luther King? He was just wasting his time. With pomo, society needs no heroes.

These ideas--although generally not this blatant (no good pomo-ist would say that about MLK)--are pervasive in our educational system. And the effect on our children is that it teaches them to never stand out in a crowd. Never stand alone. Although our children are taught all about multiculturalism on MLK day, they are implicitly taught never to do what MLK did. He stood up for an absolutist principle. The one we call justice.

And if our children do not learn that there are values worth standing up for, they become sheep for the sheering. Not taught to think independently, they become servants of the state rather than free citizens. That's not the purpose of eduation in a republic.

And that is another reason why I homeschool my son. I am not interesting in raising cannon-fodder.

"Am I buggin' ya? Didn't mean to bug ya. Edge, play the blues." --Heard on "The Joshua Tree" released by U2.

Well. I wonder what diatribe Chapter 4 of Who Killed Homer will provoke?


*I have a hard time thinking of Agamemnon and Achilles as needing rescuing. Oh, all right, I admit that they were probably oppressors of women and war-mongers, but they were authentic HEROES. And heroes can take care of themselves. Or at least discuss what their tragic flaw was when they met as shades in Hades.