Postmodernism

Postmodernism is neither a philosophy nor a unified perspective or doctrine. Rather, it is a loosely assembled collage of voices, ideas, and techniques of criticism that are juxtaposed against the long-established traditions of inquiry, especially in the empirical sciences. However, postmodernism is not antiscientific. Rather, a postmodernist perspective calls into question the privileged position that posits science is the only method of knowing that has value in the world.

Modernity is generally associated with the Age of Enlightenment beginning with the works of René Descartes (1596–1650) and later thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and François Voltaire and the assumption that reason could solve most of the world's problems. Postmodernists point out that modernists have not solved the problems of poverty and war. The last century is testimony to the irrationality of the rational mind at work with the devastation of two world wars and the Holocaust.

Postmodernists also question the basic idea of progress, that is, the assumption that the future will [Page 783]always be better than the past. Most of all, postmodernism challenges any assertion that there are universal laws, whether they are divine or imposed by the rules of science. Such laws or rules are called metanarratives, meaning that they are proffered as globally valid for all times, places, and people. Philosophies, religions, and political perspectives that serve up all-embracing viewpoints are examples of metanarratives.

Postmodernism relies heavily on knowledge of language and culture, especially the analysis of written texts. Indeed, much of postmodern criticism is literary or textual criticism based on the practice of close reading. A practice such as deconstruction is an examination of texts for antinomies, contradictions, silences, and hidden hierarchies in them.

The implication of postmodernism for educational leadership is that the position taken by postmodernists undermines the very idea of a stable knowledge base upon which a leadership practice can be established. Any knowledge base is an example of a conceit, an assumption that is untenable linguistically and logically. Stability can only be maintained by the exercise of raw political power of the state.

The primary evil for educational leadership is that of certainty, which is offered context free and is based on privileged versions of truth. Postmodernism challenges the “one right way” of thinking about things, especially so-called best practices of anything proffered outside of localism and the primacy of context and culture. The postmodern outlook on such things has been called by some critics a kind of epistemological anarchism. Postmodernism is therefore profoundly antiauthoritarian, whether dogma has been embraced as scientific method or as received truth in any other form. School leaders and those aspiring to become leaders will find preparation practices and outlooks of leading that rest on assumptions of finality or absolute truth in any form vulnerable to postmodern deconstructive criticism, including the scientific method itself.

The advantage of a postmodern outlook for educational administration is that if followed, it can lead to redefining the idea of borders, whether rooted in science or the humanities. It can promote a level playing field in the competition of ideas and perspectives that can free the discipline from the intellectual doldrums in which it has rested since it was established. Confining it to science alone dehumanizes educational leadership. Science has limits. A study of leadership clearly is beyond those limits. The postmodern view is not an argument to abandon science but to recognize science's own borders in the pursuit of greater understanding of educational leadership.

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