Post-Modernism

Post-modernism is closely related with constructivism and is development of constructivism. It is complicated term or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid 1980s. The term post-modernism is hard to define because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of discipline pr areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion and technology. It is hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it’s not clear exactly when postmodernism begins. Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge.

            Modernism has modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism. It came from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled “modernism”. This movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama, which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed and what it should mean.

            There are lots of questions to be asked about post-modernism, one of the most important is about the politics involved or more simply, is this movement toward fragmentation, provisionally, performance and instability something good or something bad?

On another level, However, Postmodernism seems to offer some alternatives to joining the global culture of consumption, where commodities and forms of knowledge are offered by forces far beyond any individual’s control. These alternatives focus on thinking of all action as necessarily local, limited and partial but nonetheless effective. Post-modernism politics offers a way to theorize local situations as fluid and unpredictable, though influenced by global trends. Hence, the motto might well be ‘think globally, act locally’ and don’t worry about any grand scheme or master plan.

Characteristics

The characteristics of the post-modernism are:-

a.      Study or comprehension

In fact knowledge is knitted in the text for Postmodernist. If any text is studied without its formation, there is no stability in meaning. The possibility of meaning is within the text that the reader will try to fulfill it and that will not be competed in a single effort. The text will be polluted with different effort. That means language or text is polluted and impure. According postmodernists every text will have certain meaning link that should be interrelated with each other. Each sentence is linked with each other in which knowledge is knitted. After reading, the comprehending of the text won’t be different.

b.      Structuralism

According to post-modernism no knowledge is final and true. Every knowledge can be construct knowledge that can be embedded or destructed and that is not absolute and final as well. A set of idea is of one structure similarly another set will have another structure. Every knowledge can give birth to know language.

c.       Knowledge or power

Postmodernists think that knowledge is power. The source of knowledge and its authenticity is researched and validated. There will be no sex discrimination and everybody will be treated as one or whole human being. The order should make as male and female, eastern and western, sane and insane. These all will be possible only through the knowledge.

d.      Certainty

Post modernists say that there will be no universality. Therefore, the small ethnic and cultural elements will be studied and diversity will be accepted in postmodernism. Instead of great hypothesis and principles, small diversified and contemporary power will be taken care of academic exercises. It gives importance to fragmentation and brings conflict among the ideology. It does not take into consideration of disorders and hierarchy.

Modernism is the coincident of the reaction and dissatisfaction of the postmodernism. Both are combined together but they have their own identity. In fact, Modernism is the main root whereas post-modernism developed upon it. For example”- “Fawn” as newly born fawn has its own existence but can not leave its mother until “bread feeding”.

Phases

The first phase is associated with particular technological developments, namely the steam-driven motor and with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely, realism. The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century. In this phase, monopoly capitalism is associate with electric and internal combustion motors, and with modernism.

     The third phase is where we are now and is multinational or consumer capitalism with emphasis placed on marketing, selling and consuming commodities, not on producing them that is associated with nuclear and electronic technologies and correlated with postmodernism.

Postmodern Educational Concepts

Constructivism is the main underlying learning theory in postmodern education. The basic idea is that all knowledge is invented or ‘constructed’ in the minds of people. Knowledge is not discovered, as modernists would claim. In other words, the ideas teachers teach and students learn do not correspond to “Reality”, they are merely human constructions. People create knowledge, ideas and language not because they are “true’, but they are useful.  Therefore, reality is story. All reality exists, not objectively. Nobody’s version of reality can claim to have more authority that is objective because all versions are merely human creations.

            “Another major feature of this tentative, relativist and instrumentalists (pragmatic) concept of knowledge is the equal worth of knowledge constructed by the learner, the teachers, or the scientists”. If no one’s knowledge is necessarily true, everything changes. Now the question of what counts as “knowledge” to be taught in the schools is not a matter of objective evidence or arguments, but rather a matter of power. Those who have the power can make sure their constructs are the ones that dominate the curriculum, while other opposing viewpoints are at least partially suppressed, ignored or “marginalized”.

Teachers in postmodernism

Since the focus of the classroom, in postmodernism education, becomes the student’s construction of knowledge, they shift away from a teacher-centered classroom to a more student-centered environment. “Rather than identifying the set of skills to be a got in children’s heads, attention shifts to establishing learning environments and science in social settings.”

The student-centered classroom in this context is likely to have minimal structure. It usually involves opportunities for social interaction, independent investigations and study, and the expression of creativity, as well as provision for different learning styles. There students create knowledge and are no longer forced to bow to the suppression of traditional objective “knowledge”. “The teacher would come to realize that what he or she presents as a “problem’ may be seen differently by the students. Consequently, the students may produce a sensible solution that makes no sense to the teacher. To be told that it is wrong is unhelpful and inhibiting or hamper because it disregards the effort the students put in.

            At least under postmodern theory we are not guilty of an even worse crime according to postmodernism scholar, Johnella Butler, who warns, “The colonization of minds is characteristic of American education.” In order words, when dominant culture calls on minorities to speak classroom English, do math, history and science the white man’s way, they have acted in the old colonial role, just like earlier European who believed it was their responsibility to colonize non-white cultures and lands imposing European standards dress, religion and language on those cultures.

Characteristics of Modernism

Modernism gives emphasis on impressionism and subjectively in writing an emphasis on how seeing takes place, rather than what is perceived. It emphasizes on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages. A tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in particular ways.

            A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs and a rejection of the distinction between “high” and “low” or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art. Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, irony and playfulness.