ABSTRACT
Postmodernism has left behind a mixed legacy for educational theory. Through a shared distaste for Marx, Hegel and dialectical thought, it has contributed to a weakening of class analysis in education studies, and helped shift the focus away from material understandings of inequality to one seemingly framed by the politics of identity. Postmodernism and its acolytes also helped to create the so-called theory wars in fields such as literacy criticism, which found their way into educational theory and helped to turn theoretical debates into often quite polarised, sour and unproductive forms of one upmanship. The effects of this are evident in today’s theoretical scholarship, which often offer entrenched intellectual positions on education with little in the way of fruitful dialogue between them—a form of intellectual siloism that has slowly crept up on educationists, with little acknowledgement of its existence or where it came from.
