Or, since we're speaking of the "Gallic pantheon", plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Periodically, some pedagogic school or other seeks to dwell on the meaning of the symbols that we call words. These days it's called deconstructionism, but it pops up from time to time in other clothes. I'm reminded of James Thurber's short story about one of his English teachers who was obsessed with figures of speech, and disapproved of reading literature "unwarily, that is, for its meaning". The story, "Here Lies Miss Groby", appeared in his book My World -- And Welcome To It, a 1942 publication that detailed his life in Columbus, Ohio, in the early 20th century. People have been drawing and quartering literature for a long time.

Frankly, I think literature specialists sometimes wake up in Plato's Cave with a hangover and decide that only the meanings of the individual words are important, and thence the meaning of "meaning", from which we proceed to the meaning of "the meaning of 'meaning'". The descent into a labyrinth constructed entirely of brackets, parentheses and various types of quotation marks is inevitable. Then someone else wakes up and declares, "You're nothing but a pack of cards." Thank you, Alice.

This time, the shadow in the Cave wears a beret. We've seen it before. It really is not Marxist, even though some of its expounders may also be Marxists themselves, and it will shrink once the sunlight hits it.

Luke Slattery is perfectly right when he says that the best way to afford people equal opportunity is to teach them to read, write, speak and analyze. He is perfectly right when he states that criticism is still important to education. He has not gone wrong when he says that one school of criticism (supposedly philosophy, but it isn't really, not at the level of which he speaks) ought not to take primacy over the others, but it happens often. Just consider the patterns of historiography: one school becomes the fashion, until it racks up enough inconsistencies, and then a new school climbs to the top.

It would be a little plainer to me what, precisely, is the focus of his complaint if he gave examples of what kinds of criticism he 's talking about with actual examples. "Picture books", he says, but that range is broad. Are the books thus being "deconstructed" in use among small children, or is the approach used for older students who will integrate this visual literature with more text-focused works? It can be quite fun to juxtapose "Ce n'est pas une pipe" with "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" when one is a teenager. When one is a child, it's only confusing.

I assume that the details are clearer to the people who live in Australia, who are his audience, after all, and who have already heard more about this.

The stupid stuff will fall away. It always does. The real issue, I believe, is the sacrifice of the children upon whose education this lesson is learned. They will survive, less knowledgeable and skilled than other cohorts, but they will survive. They will become your cynics, because they may not receive the cultural training that would help them, but (like children everywhere) they know the difference between rabbit raisins and real raisins. Every time they see a raisin, from now on, they will assume it came from the back end of a rabbit until someone proves otherwise.