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.
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Notes
Baudrillard J., “XI. Holograms.” Simulacra and Simulations. transl. Sheila Faria Glaser. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-xi-holograms/retrieved May 5, 2010.
Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action. transl. Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge: Polity, 1984.
Lampert K., Empathic Education — A Critique of Neocapitalism, Resling, 2008.
“a complex assemblage of different tendencies many of which are in a tense and unstable relationship to each other”, Apple M. W, Cultural Politics and Education, New York: Teachers College Press, 1996, 45. (quotes also by Moses (2004), 276–277).
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© 2013 Khen Lampert
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Lampert, K. (2013). The Problem of Worthlessness. In: Meritocratic Education and Social Worthlessness. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324894_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324894_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
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