Thanks to Matt for recommending the following. It clearly sets out the stakes of current discussion around theory.
Link: Ghost in the Wire: On Theory and its Empire, 1: The Pedagogy of Reception.
Now we can spend time declaring, as so many have and continue to do, that conventional liberal arts education no longer benefits from theoretical enterprises - whatever "theoretical" here entails - and that now the so-called liberal arts actually suffer from these sorts of abstractions. We can also spend time lauding theory's historical benefits, its role in opening the canon, introducing new problematics and new themes, and in paving new avenues for thinking resistance in the era of supposedly late capitalism. Both of these have their place, but neither grapples with one of the major challenges we in the Academy face today: the collapse of the liberal arts educational model and the apotheosis of a scientistic, test-based approach to measuring and parsing educational progress. The Leave No Child Behind act - often dubbed the Leave All Children Behind act - celebrates nothing but practice, nothing but data sets. With it, the economies that delimit education in the United States are increasingly overdetermined by a confluence of three forces:
1. The modification of a curriculum that teaches material in order to maximize student performance on standardized exams. This means that alternate ways of exploring classroom education, of learning material not covered by the tests, or of testing in ways out of step with the standardized materials actually provide an opportunity cost that discourages their adoption and use: namely, they distract from the opportunity to teach students exactly (and only) what they need to know to demonstrate the school's ability to teach what the new "accountability" tests measure. ...
2. A set of corporate and political interests that coincide to produce the tests and the guides that assist students in passing them ...
3. A metric marked by memorization and isolated types of problem solving rather than creative and critical thinking, and then couples this metric with a harsh and punitive sanction regime. This is the scientistic necessity of the sorts of tests celebrated by the act and enshrined in the yearly accountability standards that determine school funding. In a handful of years, colleges will be flush with undergraduates who have had even more limited exposure to critical thought. And yet, this is what theory does best, providing models for just the sort of critical thought sorely lacking in students already. ...
With this situation in mind, there has never been more of a time to celebrate theory, to teach theory, to encourage philosophy and abstraction and practices that need not be tethered to some measure of their practicality. This isn't the time to celebrate theory's end; rather this is the time to work strenuously for its resurrection, or to sit down for a seance with the theory version of the Goddess. It is no coincidence that Derrida spent so much of his career working in GREPH to advance the high school curriculum by promoting a "right to philosophy," which in the context of the discussion of Theory's Empire might as well be renamed the "right to theory."
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