The Problem of Worthlessness

Abstract

This chapter discusses the difficulty of generating worth in the postmodern era. A number of salient characteristics of postmodernism severely challenge any attempt (educational or otherwise) to construct worth: the (welcome) erosion of dichotomies; the loss of obligatory values; the de-reification of public personae; the diminishing of creative imagination in an age of televised simulacra; etc. These all create a social substrate of general worthlessness. In school, the public image of worthlessness is translated into what I term “The Butler Syndrome,” with school as a servant of commercial ideology.