Schooling and the (re)production of Social Inequalities: What Can and Should We Be Doing?

To speak of an ideal is to lay claim to what ought or should be and to explain ‘reality’ as deviation. That is, ideals serve to provide direction towards some desired goal as well as judgment about how well a perceived reality approximates that desire. In more recent times, the postmodernist critique has provided its own ‘reality check’ on modernist ideals, challenging the notion that there is one best way to reach utopian ends. The emergence of postmodern theories has signalled a general shift in 'the structure of feeling' from acquiescence to censure of the universal. But it is not as if there are no postmodern ideals. In these accounts, utopianism is more cogently understood as ‘heterotopianisms’. While we are convinced by such critique, that there are diverse goals of value and pathways to reach them, we admit to some uneasiness about a ‘postmodern pluralism’ in which ideals have the potential to wash away into relativism, where one ideal is as good as the next and ways of achieving them are also equally regarded.