ABSTRACT
It has been almost thirty years now since the official publication of Bill Perry’s book, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (1970), although at long last, the book has been reissued in paperback (1998, by Jossey-Bass) with a new introduction by Lee Knefelkamp, one of the first and most significant translators of Perry’s work into educational practice. In the time since the original publication of Perry’s book, scholarship across a wide range of domains, including educational research, has expanded and fractured in ways analogous to the process depicted in the Perry scheme. Issues of race, class, power, and elitism have been added to gender as the bases for various forms of cultural critique, and virtually all existing “truths” have been deconstructed and called into question. In academic scholarship, and increasingly in the popular press, there has been much talk of shifting paradigms, with modernism giving way to “postmodernism,” and “deconstructionism” raising analytical critiques of existing theories and perspectives (Burbules & Rice, 1991). Gergen (1991) describes one form of this thinking:
Postmodernism does not bring with it a new vocabulary for understanding ourselves, new traits or characteristics to be explored. Its impact is more apocalyptic than that: the very concept of personal essences is thrown into doubt…(1991,p.7)
In the view of Burbules and Rice, this extreme form of deconstruction and postmodernnism is really more of an “antimodernism,” often functioning as a form of “pure” relativism at a cultural scale:
Having deconstructed all metanarratives and radically relativized all possible values, antimodernism is left with no clear way of justifying any alternatives…In our view, this antimodernist
position is unsustainable either intellectually or practically. (1991, p. 398)
In contrast to this antimodern approach, Burbules and Rice argue for a true postmodern perspective that would extend and reconstruct modernist thinking, in effect moving beyond the underlying “either/or” dualism inherent in deconstruction to a new “both/and” synthesis.
