LAUSR

Popper (1972) suggests ‘three ontologically distinct sub-worlds’. World 1, the physical reality of tools and bodies. World 2, the reality of consciousness, such as subjective knowledge and experience, is an interface between Worlds 1 and 3. World 3 is an amassed episteme-like knowledge and theories in objective sense, including poetics, arts, logics, axiology, philosophy, and theology. They all, World 3 in particular, constitute the curriculum in education today. World 3 is cumulative, yet, if Popper is right, never universal and definitive. For joiners of postmodernism, this latter World consists of metanarratives that should be deconstructed. However, the coexistence of theories at odds (e.g. Popper’s vs. Kuhn’s) is a main characteristic of postmodernity and, consequently, agreement over the definition of what postmodernity (époque/philosophy) and postmodernism (movement) is unheard of. Eco (1994) also avoided defining postmodernity saying the postmodern reaction to the modern is an attitude towards the past with irony and never innocent. Yet, education field’s World 3 has been only marginally affected by the postmodern wave in philosophy. Against Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984), we educationalists could easily contend metanarratives and theories are often undistinguishable in our field. Furthermore, in the purported ‘science of education’, which resists to be a hard-science, has generated and relies on potent metanarratives including the need of globalization, ‘STEM’ priority and global citizenship education discourses. Nevertheless, a notable consequence that postmodernism brought about to education is perhaps an insatiable inculcation of critical thinking in its analytico-revisionist dimension. It is questionable, however, whether education field per se and in its entirety has undergone the postmodern ‘archeology of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1983). Postmodernism never became a dominant movement across all higher education faculties and far less impact on basic/formal primary and secondary education. Furthermore, modernity can be an unfinished process. In Asia, we remain struggling to come to terms with our own modernity disconfigured by colonization and geopolitics following World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War. While Asian education is now being engulfed by neo-liberalism and neo-imperialism (Park, 2016), we are still subjected to many metanarratives, and perhaps too comfortably so. In my view, postmodernity and, especially, postmodernism were a water drop on the granite cliff on the Eastern side of the Urals. Lyotard’s exaggeration of popularized incredulity toward metanarratives probably never happened in most parts of Asia. So, in pondering this project’s leitmotif, we could safely utter that in Asia and possibly beyond, postmodernity did not change education greatly and the bulk of its advancement came from mesoand microlevel incremental improvements and, more recently, from rapidly updatable areas of World 3 such as sustainability-aimed knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge. The suggestion we are dwellers of a ‘brave post-post-modern era’ and we should properly name it somehow, we educationalists have abundant ammunitions to ironically question it as geologists did for decades over the term Anthropocene.