5. As an academic movement, post-modernism’s trendy acceptance has had an enormous
impact on virtually all academic disciplines, particularly hermeneutics. Because everyone
comes to an interpretive context with unique history, it has been argued that the idea of
a ‘correct interpretation’ is inherently problematic. Similarly with education, each student
comes into the classroom with a different set of life experiences, and who is in a position
to say that her interpretation of a lecture or classroom activity is any more or any less
correct than someone else’s? For example, a history lecture about the treatment of blacks
in the post-reconstruction South is likely to be interpreted differently depending on what
racial group one identifies with. There would be no justification for saying that the
experiences of black students, while different from Asian students, are any better or
worse. They would just be different interpretations of the same lecture. This is often used,
unfortunately, to then draw the conclusion that any interpretation, no matter how bizarre
or unrelated, would be an ‘equally correct’ one. An extreme example of this would be
attending a lecture on the treatment of freed slaves, and then ‘getting out of it’ that cable
is superior to satellite, and then having this be a completely acceptable interpretation.