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and “truth” simply ends where it began. There is no movement
and no change. There is only stagnation.
The utter certainty of a Post-Modern-heralded Uncertainty
is Certainty. And it is a Certainty that is no less “fixed and
immutable,” no less “absolute” and “supreme,” no matter how
sincere and zealous calls for questioning and conflict and
opposition and subversion and revolution may be. No matter what
philanthropic, egalitarian, and humanitarian ends may be at
stake – culturally, socially, politically, economically, and so
on and so forth – it is no different than those Christian
priests telling pagans and heathens, from Britania to Aztlan,
from the Congo to Samoa, that their gods and the “realities” and
“truth” of their existence, whether in this world or the next,
were nothing but lies. When all is said and done, do the “ends”
truly justify the “means”? With the situation that Knoblauch is
describing, it is still the handing out of those “bricks” of
knowledge – prefabricated and predigested – which, to John
Dewey, again, was the utter antithesis of “education.” To
Dewey, it amounted to indoctrination.
This is what Maxine Hairston warned of in “Diversity,
Ideology, and the Teaching of Writing”: the “real danger of
[freshman English] being co-opted by the radical left, coerced
into acquiescing to methods we abhor because, in the abstract,
we have some mutual goals” (187). I referred before to
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