Becoming a ‘Mythologist’: Barthes’ Mythologies and Education

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Chapter 54Becoming a ‘Mythologist’: Barthes’ Mythologies and Education

Jesse Bazzul

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015P. P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics,DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_54

J. Bazzul ()University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dartmouth, MA 02747, USAe-mail: [email protected]

I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there (Roland Barthes, Preface to Mythologies, 1972a, p. xx).

In neoliberal, global capitalist times, with its vision of the public as homo eco-nomicus, humans isolated from their social needs and the natural world, it may be as urgent as ever to confront the abundance of myths in education that work to repro-duce our current social order (Foucault and Senellart 2008). This chapter encour-ages educators and students to interrogate educational practices and phenomena that are presented as natural, commonsensical understandings of the world by becoming what Roland Barthes (1972a) calls mythologists. Barthes’ Mythologies, along with their semiotic methods of ideology critique, have not been employed to a significant extent in education; however, some have seen the potential. For example, David Granger (2008) sees contemporary school reforms (e.g. No Child Left Behind) as reliant on mythological forms of ‘the spectacle’, which Barthes (1972a) develops in his mythology ‘The World of Wrestling’. Like Roland Barthes, I am motivated by the contradictions of my ‘present’, and the desire to tease them from common sense.

The next section outlines the most salient aspects of Barthes’ semiology. The remainder of the chapter deals with ideological aspects of bourgeois myth and ex-plores the idea of becoming ‘mythologists’ in education. I conclude by highlighting four examples of non-fiction writing that attempt to ‘demythologize’ four of my experiences in education that function in mythical ways. These mythologies are intended to be an example of creative (de)mythologist writing and critical reflective practice.

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54.1 Barthes’ Mythologies and Myth Today

About three days after I began to compile notes about what makes Roland Barthes’ (1972a) Mythologies a text worth examining in education studies, I came across an obituary for the artist Richard Hamilton, a contemporary of Roland Barthes in the critique of consumer culture and advertising (Grimes 2011, Sept 13). As my eyes moved down the screen, I came across the collage, What is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Hamilton’s way of turning suburban life from the ordered accumulation of modern technology and economic success to some-thing fabricated along the lines of a completely different cultural logic was argu-ably the same ‘move’ made by Barthes in Mythologies. The work of both Barthes and Hamilton attempts to make everyday common experiences in bourgeois society (today’s version being global capitalist, neoliberal) seem less ordinary and more like a dream, or rather someone else’s dream. Published in 1957, Mythologies is perhaps the world’s quintessential social semiotic text, but is often forgotten along-side Barthes’ later sociological work (Culler 2001). Barthes is continually cast into two selves. On the one hand, a mythologist, who looks for the operation of signs and ideology in cultural norms, and on the other, his passionate descent into pleasure and what eludes signification in images and text (Oxman 2010). Mythologies con-sists of a series of creative non-fiction essays which expose how myths of bourgeois culture are infused into everyday practices/objects that seem natural in themselves, from the French love of wine to the world of fake wrestling (or is it fake?). My-thologies was ‘a mode of practicing cultural studies before its more recent forms of actualization’ (Stivale 2002, p. 458). Originally published in the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, Barthes’ three-to-four-page mythologies, and the accompanying essay entitled ‘Myth Today’, aroused much debate on both sides of the political spectrum. In the early 1950s, Barthes shifted from a more dialectical approach to demystification to one that tried to establish myth’s transmission and consumption within a somewhat scientific discipline (Stafford 1998). Barthes’ use of myth to critique what was given as universal moved myth away from something anthropo-logical as in the work of Levi-Strauss’ (1979), and opened the way for semiotics to establish itself as a discipline that engages the complexities of the present (Cal-efato 2008). As Charles Stivale (2002) cleverly emphasizes, Mythologies relies on a unique ambivalence given to myth, at once something deliciously pleasurable to read, to dissect, yet so critically cutting. The insight contained within Mythologies, along with the parallels between the bourgeois ideology and the current twenty-first century reality of global capitalism and neoliberal ideology, makes it a fundamental text in dealing with what is given to us unproblematically in media, pop culture, and official discourses. At the very least, Mythologies is probably the best introductory text to critical social semiotics (Veivo 2008).

For Barthes, myth in bourgeois society can attach itself to any system of mean-ing. Myth naturalizes elements found in culture and transforms them into univer-salized norms, the danger of which is at least twofold. First, the dissemination of myth promotes a kind of unreflective acceptance of cultural norms and messages. Second, the ideological content of the message, of myth, is taken as a statement of

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fact, perfectly natural in itself. Much of the complexities of history, of the signifier to the signified, are limited and distorted by myth for ideological purposes (Trifonas 2001). For example, the public perception of the Occupy Wall Street movement is based on mythic understandings—truisms the public is meant to accept uncriti-cally without recourse to history or politics. Keith Boykin (2011) names some of these ‘truisms’, including Occupy’s use of violence, lack of black or working-class participation, anti-Americanism, and lack of direction—while it is in fact multi-directional, quite peaceful, and has been organized for the sake of all Americans. The usefulness of Mythologies today lies in the fact that ideological content in the twenty-first century has been rendered more invisible. While old ideologies still exist, new ones emerge when we believe we are being open-minded and ideologi-cally‘aware’.AsSlavojŽižek(2011) argues, today we are ideological precisely at the location of our cynicism, for it is in this cynicism (for example, disdain for the practices of Walmart™) where ideology functions (we shop at Walmart™ anyway). As Patrick French (2009) points out, ‘in Mythologies, everyday life is seen as the exclusive prey of ideology, of mythic or discursive capture’ (p. 118). For Barthes, nothing is exempt from myth and ideological signification.

Barthes was interested in the systematic way in which bourgeois culture present-ed itself as universal and wanted to account for how this mystification occurs both semiologically and ideologically. He anticipated that semiotics, and more specifi-cally the study of myth, would become a scientific discipline. Barthes and Sontag (1982) later abandoned hopes of establishing a science, insisting more on an art form, claiming that semiology,

does not rest on a “semiophysis,” an inert naturalness of the sign, and it is also not a “semio-clastry”, a destruction of the sign. Rather… it is a semiotropy: turned toward the sign, this semiology is captivated by and receives the sign, treats and if need be, imitates it as an imaginary spectacle. The semiologist is, in short, an artist (as quoted in Noth 1990, p. 475).

Reading through Mythologies, it is clear that there are traces of both conceptions of semiology—the groping for a kind of scientific coherence and an acute creativity. Unfettering his work from other meanings attributed to the word myth, Barthes sets out to describe a type of speech, a form onto itself. For Barthes, myth has a distinct semiological character in that it can be studied as form apart from its content, yet can also be seen as a historical or ideological phenomenon, its relation to semiology being the study of ‘ideas in form’ (Barthes 1972a, p. 112).

54.2 Barthes’ Semiology of Myth

To recognize myth at the level of semiology, two important concepts must be under-stood. First, that the relation between the signified and the signifier is itself a sign. Second, that myth is built on top of this original structure of signifier and signified in that the sign of the first system becomes a signifier in the next. In this way, myth is also a metalanguage because it speaks about a first-order system. Figure 54.1, adapted from ‘Myth Today’, illustrates the relation between a first- and second-

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order semiological system, between language and myth, using the example of the political entity of Canada.

In Fig. 54.1, the ‘political entity of Canada’ exists in two semiological systems, as a sign in the first and a signifier in the second. This ‘site’ for myth is ambiguous in that it occupies, at the same time, meaning from the linguistic system (the histo-ries and complex relations that make up Canada) and form from the side of myth (a space to be filled with the myth of Canada as a peaceful, socially just nation). From the side of meaning (language), the ‘political entity of Canada’ has many histories, political relationships, and memories; from the side of form (mythical signification), memory and history are emptied. Knowledges and histories must vacate and make way for signification or mythical notions of this political entity. However, the political entity of Canada as a form does not destroy all meaning, knowledge, and history, it only diminishes it, since the form must be able to obtain, from the meaning (of political entity of Canada) whatever it needs to be rooted. As Barthes (1972a) says, ‘It is this constant game of hide and seek between the mean-ing and form which defines myth’ (p. 118). The form is filled by the knowledge of the mythological concept; however, it can easily alternate with its actual signified meaning so as to hide in a kind of turnstile. The signified concept that fills the form, however, is never ambiguous; this concept (Canada as a peaceful nation) is spe-cifically meant to be appropriated by the receiver of myth. Thus, one fundamental feature of the mythical concept is that it gets appropriated. The mythical signified can have many signifiers as well, and it is in the repetition of the mythical signified, in its many different signifiers, that myth is located and deciphered. Barthes (1977b) employs this notion when examining the language of advertising and the common ideological domain of connotative systems that become naturalized by a plethora of denotative messages. The conception of Canada as a particular kind of nation, socially just, kind, peace-loving, will therefore be present in all sorts of signifiers (cartoons, newspaper headlines). In this way, Barthes (1981) notes that photographs cannot signify, due to their diectic existence, unless given a mask or concept which operates as a kind of myth. As Barthes says, ‘This is why the great portrait photog-raphers are also great mythologists’ (p. 34).

Fig. 54.1 Barthes semiology of myth using the example of the political entity of Canada


54.2.1 Reading Myth

Mythologies advocates a way of reading myth that sees the signifier as both form and meaning. In this way, the ‘mythologist’ can recognize the ambiguity of sig-nification. In our example from Fig. 54.1, it would involve seeing the signifier of the Red Maple Leaf, and what it immediately signifies, as both a sign with a his-tory and a complex political reality as well as form that is filled with a particular type of mythic understanding. This way of reading involves having the reader ‘live with’ myth while revealing its essential function, taking the reader from semiology into ideology. That is to say, the reader will see where and how what is historical, political, and complex is turned into something natural. Barthes summarizes this succinctly:

We reach here the very principle of myth; it transforms history into nature…what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into some-thing natural; it is not read as motive but as a reason. (p. 129)

It is this natural state that provides myth with its full force, as the power of myth lies in its first impression. Much of the time, it matters little that one later ‘sees through’ myth as the mythical concept has already been relayed. As Barthes (1972a) says, ‘a more attentive reading of the myth will in no way increase its power or effective-ness’ (p. 130). The power of myth is not in what it hides, but in its ability to turn its message into something innocent or natural. The reader takes the mythic significa-tion for a system of facts rather than one of values coming out of history, politics, or material conditions.

54.3 Ideology and Bourgeois Myth

Barthes’ treatment of myth as ideology is imbedded within a Marxist political con-text of post-war France. His stance towards myth is vitriolic, which can be seen in his claim that myth essentially robs language, like a helpless victim, of its richness. Myth is like a virus—something that insinuates and swells in the open meanings of language. To Barthes, ‘the very end of myths is to immobolize the world: they sug-gest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions’ (p. 155). For example, in education, the Race to the Top initiative has been successful in getting the American public to quickly accept (they are meant to accept) that great schools are ones that satisfy standards set by neoliberal govern-ment initiatives and standardized tests (Bazzul 2012). The struggle for the mytholo-gists in education centres on nothing less than the purposes of schooling.

This leads to Barthes’ most useful statement regarding myth: ‘Myth is depoliti-cized speech’ (p. 143). In fields like education, we must ask if what is given to us (teachers and students) is given as simple fact or something that ‘goes without say-ing’. For Barthes, bourgeois myth,

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abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wal-lowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves. (p. 143)

Myth is characterized by a metalanguage that celebrates things, rather than acting upon them. Therefore, the opposite of mythic speech is one that speaks of action, one that remains political. Whenever one speaks in order to transform reality, rather than speak about it, language is referred directly to an object, to the making of things, and myth becomes impossible. For Barthes, the fact that the bourgeois hides class difference, and therefore its own presence in the world, requires it to speak with mythic language, whereas revolutionary speech about material conditions de-clares itself openly political, thereby speaking of the world directly and abolishing myth.

Barthes outlines seven rhetorical forms that bourgeois ideology and myth uti-lizes when turning the historical into the natural. In his own mythology essays, he exposes some of these rhetorical forms as they function within cultural representa-tions. These rhetorical forms are listed below:

The Inoculation This consists in admitting nominal wrongdoing in order to immu-nize against far-reaching criticism. In terms of the signification of Canada, this could amount to an admission of small mistakes by past governments, which func-tions to preserve the image of Canada as a peaceful, socially just nation.

The Privation of History History evaporates from the object of myth. Myth doesn’t dispense with history altogether. Instead, it selects a particular history and subse-quently the ‘natural’ contingency of that history, one meant to come into existence since the beginning.

Identification Reducing another person to sameness since recognizing ‘the other’ puts the bourgeois universe in danger. Bourgeois myth is also quick to define a natu-ral state to man, and if there should prove to be an exception, it becomes ‘exotic’ and/or deviant.

Tautology This rhetorical device deprives something of its history by defining like by like, such as girls will be girls. In Barthes’ (1979) mythology ‘Billy Graham at the Vel’ d’Hiv’, he describes Graham’s speech as ‘devoid of content that is not tau-tological (God is God)’ (p. 64).

Neither-norisms Essentially, ‘I want neither this nor that’, which establishes an ideal middle. Barthes argues that such a tactic is a way of renouncing a priori judge-ments, giving the illusion of freedom from a pre-existing set of values.

The Quantification of Quality Bourgeois myth reduces quality to a quantity. When ‘myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply’ (Barthes 1972a, p. 153). The high cost of a piece of art, or the status of a person’s salary, all work to obscure a discussion of quality.


The Statement of Fact Best understood as the use of common sense. Rather than make statements which speak of real circumstances, commonsensical statements appeal to eternity.

54.3.1 Engaging Myth Conceptions

Barthes’ semiotic and ideological rendering of myth, if nothing else, operates as a battle cry against what is given to us as natural and eternal. In his photographic autobiography, Roland Barthes, he articulates this sentiment vividly:

He could not get away from that grim notion that true violence is that of the self evident: what is evident is violent even if this evidence is gently, liberally, democratically repre-sented; what is paradoxical, what does not follow of itself, is less so, even if it is imposed arbitrarily; a tyrant who promulgated preposterous laws would all in all be less violent than the masses which were content to utter what is self-evident, what follows of itself; the ‘natural’ is in short, the ultimate outrage. (Barthes 1977a, p. 85)

Barthes is wary of the role of ‘intellectual as mythologist’ as he sees it as one of pro-found alienation. By disrupting myth, mythologists cut themselves off from myth consumers. In the case of ‘the peaceful nation of Canada’, it means cutting oneself off from those who take comfort in such a myth—who find their very humanity in borrowing it. Furthermore, the mythologist is barred from revolutionary action or ‘speaking the real’ when she is confined to speaking about myth using a metalan-guage. Barthes (1972b) later develops a more nuanced position for the writer, one of écrivains et écrivants, the writer who produces for and despite society, respectively, and who oscillates between these two positions.

Barthes outlines two ethical pathways for mythologists: ‘Either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, to ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case poetize’ (p. 158). One can also become a reader of myths, and describe, always after the fact, how these myths are rendered as natural, as Barthes does in his mythologies. I urge this kind of (de)mythologist writing for the field of education, where didactic, common-sense understandings seem to be the preferred mode of speech (Bazzul 2013). These cre-ative non-fiction texts could also take fictional form. Another way to disrupt myth is to create a third semiological system where the signification becomes the signifier of yet another system—as Barthes says, ‘why not rob myth?’ While Barthes cites Flaubert as one who makes myth of myth, perhaps the best example of ‘mythologi-cal’ fiction is the work of Luis Borges, who creates myths, often more detailed than the original, on the back of other myths (Borges and Kerrigan 1962). This can be seen in the short story ‘The Gospel According to Mark’, which renders Christian myths ‘reopened’ for understanding the relationship between God, the people, and the text, while robbing particular canonized doctrines of Jesus Christ of their mythic signification(s). Fictional writing disrupts myth by robbing the ‘naturalized’ original and superimposing another myth, equally naturalized, but now quite noticeably so.

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Though Barthes moved slightly away from his earlier writings, he did not negate the semiological and political analysis of Mythologies. If Barthes had lived to see the world’s descent into a so-called post-ideological age, he may not have con-cluded that today’s mythologies are ‘readily apparent’.

54.4 What Could It Mean to Mythologize?

In this section, I present examples of (de)mythologist writing that attempts to dis-rupt representations and practices in education. These four pieces were written to make sense of my own experiences working as a school science teacher. Though my mythologies are creative non-fiction, such writing could also be fictional, with the goal of exposing the first mythology seen as a ‘naivety’ (Barthes 1972a, p. 148). Following Barthes, mythologizing can be seen both as deciphering myth and cre-ative writing using a range of literary formats. The four abbreviated pieces of my-thologizing below are entitled ‘The Dean’s Speech’, ‘The International School in Pechersk’, ‘False Debates in Science Education (NOS versus FOS)’, and ‘The Ru-bric’. These mythologies take the form of Barthes’ small mythology essays, and involve drawing ideological aspects out of the banal.

54.4.1 The Dean’s Speech

The new teacher educators sit still in small chairs, listening to the Dean’s speech. They watch her long slender fingers outstretch, then clasp again. One could say they are wrapped up in her speech; they are implicated in her excellence.

The Dean opens her speech with the goals of the teacher education programme—excellence in teaching based on the latest research—and reaffirms the institution as one of the best. Both statements are spoken as if justified in themselves—there is no mention of exactly how we excel or lead. Educational institution in Mussolini’s Italy could easily have said the same thing—and meant it. Excellence is also arbi-trary. It exists for automobiles and war planning. The teacher educator beside me bobs her head; it is difficult to refuse excellence.

The speech turns to one of the Dean’s first experiences as a teacher educator, signalling her arrival at the podium as a destination. When she was just starting out, she begins, a student teacher had come to see her about a teacher certification exam that she had failed by two points. The Dean tells us how she invited the student to sit down and review the test, to see where she went wrong. When the review was completed, the student teacher was asked if she understood where she had erred and if she had any more questions. Affecting a bedraggled tone, the Dean assumes the voice of the student teacher who pleads that she had worked very hard all year and studied countless hours for the exam. At this point, the tension in the Dean’s story is at its highest as it is not quite clear to us, the audience, what the outcome will be. Will the Dean’s response be appropriate? Is this a lesson of folly?


The Dean continues her speech by describing how she assured the student teacher that she should be proud of that effort, but that the score of the test was to stand. The Dean now affects an angry voice for the student teacher who exclaims irately that education is not medicine or nuclear physics and beseeches the Dean to let her pass based on her year’s work and efforts. The Dean pauses here looking directly at some of us before exhaling her response. Emphatically, she explains how she looked the student teacher directly in the eye and told her that the teaching exam was just as important as the exams that happen in physics or medicine, and if she, the student teacher, was serious about being a teacher, she could try again next year. Closing her speech, the Dean exclaims that the idea of excellence is what our distinguished teaching faculty must take to the teaching profession, that students deserve no less than the best. Everyone claps for the Dean’s speech. She steps off the podium and takes her seat at the head table while the audience of new teacher educators quietly await the rest of their orientation.

It is the wielding of an undescribed excellence along with its inseparability from the Dean’s actions, and by extension the future actions of the teacher educators, which casts the Dean’s speech as overtly mythic. It is never clear what excellence entails, yet it is presented as natural and measurable. The Dean is assumed to have the same wisdom in the past as she has at the time of the speech, thereby lifting the story of the student teacher’s situation out of any context and into the realm of the universal and ahistorical. There is no ambiguity in the Dean’s speech, not only in what the student teacher ‘knows’ (less than she should) but also in what counts as knowledge (definitive test answers quantified). No actual reason is given to fail the student teacher aside from a mysterious quantification. From what is said, the reason the student teacher failed is not the test itself, for we do not know its content, structure, or purpose, but simply because the Dean said so. All of us witnessing the speech were made to sit on the same plain of ideas and contexts as the Dean, the test, and the student teacher of the past—that of universal knowledge in the hands of the powerful. Here, treating education as science acts also as a simulacrum, one that disguises a lack of systematic thought in the student teacher’s case. The Dean’s story relays a particular set of values, not truths.

54.4.2 The International School in Pechersk

We could not ask for a better simulation of international relations than the interna-tional school. Here, privileged children participate in model United Nations along-side local support workers and students, providing plentiful opportunities to see international relations at work. These opportunities are amplified by the honesty and pragmatism of teachers hired out of places like Manchester, Alberta, and Salt Lake City. Unlike their diplomatic counterparts, whose job it is to represent their state (and not themselves), international school teachers and principals must not keep their opinions discreet. They cannot help but speak about what they were hired to do. In the Pechersk neighbourhood of Kyiv, there is such a school, and there I was able to see international relations up-close.

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In September came the inoculation, the carnival—or international night—where expatriate students and parents parade the essential garb and food dishes meant to be theirs (their national/ethnic background). About 80% of the community will actu-ally understand this as a celebration of multiculturalism. The rest understand at least one level of superficiality—international night doesn’t really address the diversity or political situations in schools, although nobody bothers to say this publically. But seeing international night as a banality misses the point, as its real function is to set up the illusion of a level playing field. In seeing a panorama of national or ‘ethnic’ costumes, the very inequities by which the international school functions are offi-cially forgotten. The Italians serve caprese salad next to the Ethiopian stewed goat. The question becomes who is more connoted by their food? The more of an ‘other’ you are, the more people flock to your food table. But if international night is recog-nized as a farce (and it is), why is it allowed to continue? The answer is to confirm the exotic, to confirm it to all—but not openly to the public space as taking down international relations is serious business! International night depoliticizes, turning nations into monomers, and only then can diplomatic relations enter the classroom, clouding oppressions with ‘we are not a problem’.

At this school, teachers from Ukraine earn three times less for equal work. Basic logic dictates that workers who do the same work in the same conditions deserve the same pay; however, the salary difference between Ukrainian and expat teachers grew during my time at the school. This material imbalance was kept in place by the justification that if a teacher had taught in two or more countries, they were entitled to an expatriate salary. However, the school’s logic breaks down as soon as an expat teacher from Amsterdam or Montreal is hired directly out of the university, or their local school districts, as these teachers begin receiving expatriate pay without meet-ing the requirements for an expatriate salary (they have taught in a maximum of one country only). It is a sign of pure ideological success when a simple quantification is openly falsified yet passes for legitimate. And while there were sincere sounding pledges to raise Ukrainian salaries, there was no movement in the school to equal-ize salaries.

What was most striking (pun intended) was how Ukrainians managed to work alongside expatriate teachers. In one sense it is easy enough to understand, jobs were scarce, let alone jobs where you could almost support yourself. Moreover, to some of the Ukrainian staff, it was fair. Teaching in two countries was the criterion—and they were lacking. One local Ukrainian teacher in my department, who had recently completed her Ph.D., often argued with me about the right of a company to value its workers how it wanted. So although it was clear that a teacher technically did not have to work in two countries to make an expat salary, this false stipulation kept large sums of money out of Ukrainian pockets. Here, as Barthes says, the petite bourgeoisie is unable to imagine the other. And this absence of imagination, sus-tained by a desire to maintain advantage over another, allowed the faculty and ad-ministration of this school to set up grossly unequal material conditions. Backed by power and capital, this lack of imagination was so strong it also functioned on the side the oppressed Ukrainian staff, as some believed, they were lacking some kind of vital teaching knowledge—while in fact they had decades of teaching experi-ence, advanced subject knowledge, and vast understanding of the local community.


At the time, my friends and I were also satisfied with common-sense answers and tautologies. If local exploitation was ever an issue, it was always levelled to a motionless world with phrases like ‘This always happens in countries like Ukraine’ or ‘Business is business’ or ‘That’s the way the world works’. Sadly, we missed a chance to really live in Kyiv.

54.4.3 False Debates in Science Education (NOS vs. FOS)

Declaring the true nature of anything is best left to the category of failure—sci-ence’s never-be-satisfied culture adheres well to this. However, in science education research, homage must be paid to a small list of tenets that are meant to encapsu-late science. A list of seven items makes up what is called the ‘nature of science’ (NOS).1 There is nothing wrong with lists. They are an indispensable organizing device seen in various places such as the grocery store and the Bible. But lists can-not describe the complexities, controversies, and reality of science just like they cannot summarize art, relationships, history, politics, the mind, the home, or phi-losophy. Yet science educators have been subjected to debates about the number of list items and even whether we should be talking about features of science or the nature of science (FOS vs. NOS). These debates become contests between one version of conservatism versus another. It is crucial to ask, what has been deemed indispensible? It is the list as form. There must be a list as if to say: ‘science must be something, we know what we are doing’.

However, the inability to debunk a list is a symptom of a larger problem. As science educator Anastasios Siatras notes, science education operates like a phal-locracy, a macho sword fight we must all sit down and watch, lest the bullies turn on us. Power is openly exercised, seniority is generally unchallenged, and anti-intellectualism runs rampant. A science that already exists is chosen over concep-tions of science yet to be offered. This disciplinary form gives the ‘list speaker’ the authority, like any good disciplinarian, to dismiss. Other ways of knowing, all dialogue disappears into a chasm for the childish. The items of the list are not di-rected towards a world to be made; they must overlay one that is already made, and then bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance. The debates force us into an impossible position as the critic, as we must inevitably say we want neither FOS nor NOS. Since they are the same, I am exiled to a new realm separate from them. I am forced outside the content of a false debate.

1 These tenets are that scientific knowledge is tentative (subject to change); empirically based (based on and/or derived from observations of the natural world); subjective (theory laden); partly the product of human inference, imagination, and creativity (involves the invention of explana-tion); and socially and culturally embedded (Abd-El-Khalick et al. 1998, p. 418).

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54.4.4 The Rubric

What used to be red-inked instructions for correctly reading medieval religious texts has now become a measuring device for the work of the student. For all mean-ingful pieces of school work, there is now a rubric, graded criteria leading to a score. These days, students must be given their rubric. What they strive for has to be measurable, locatable on a grid; explanation is given secondary importance. Rubrics use the language of accounting to systematize the relationships between power and grading, concealing the messiness of things and a connection to worlds that matter. It is the move from one-dimensional ideology to two, from the percent-age to the grid.

Allowing children to participate in their own quantification, and further alien-ation from their work, is consistent with new forms of self-discipline. Students are never involved in the decision to have a rubric, nor can they change the overarch-ing standards and skills to be acquired; they simply determine how they will show what is already expected of them. Nowhere have I seen rubrics with the following descriptors: tangibly improved the lives of others; rendered a fundamental problem/error with curricular or teacher assumptions; challenged the authority of large in-stitutions.

The rubric’s language is binaric; descriptors are either attained or not, and after the addition of good descriptors, a score is rendered. The goal of the rubric is to, each time, invent equality anew. Poor is equidistant to mediocre which is equi-distant to excellent; they involve the same step from the middle (and so distance becomes the location of ideology). The rubric places everyone geographically; stu-dents are not only interpellated but also told they can move (to the good spaces) only by upping their count of good qualifiers. The rubric is a response to the lack of accountability of the one-dimensional percentage: 78, 95, 55, 40, and 65. Here the form, the number itself, could be filled with whatever content (ideology) happened to fill it. However, the mythology of the grade and the professor was at the very least a somewhat open one, an openly empty(ing) practice. For the rubric, the mythology is qualification, used to marshal in a regime of quantification and a ‘you need more of this’ culture. Now with rubrics, no work’s uniqueness can be seen outside of a grid because alternatives to their qualifiers do not exist. All ambiguity fades away, leaving the rectangular shape of a curricular subject.

54.5 Conclusion

Writers can creatively push the limits of what is given to us as natural by consider-ing Roland Barthes’ mythologies both theoretically and as a model for writing. Fol-lowing Barthes, we can look for what is given to us as natural and the connotations that inhabit ‘what goes without saying’. Those who engage in myth reading and writing do not have to take all the ideological and semiological aspects of Barthes’ notions of myth as each aspect can function as a separate tool for challenging what


is taken for granted. The four pieces of educational myth(ologist) writing above are just an example of how Barthes’ mythologies can inspire us to challenge what is possible in an education culture where many things are purported to be common sense.AsSlavojŽižek (2011) maintains in Living in the End Times, our current struggle ‘is against the global order and the ideological mystification that sustains it’ (p. xv). The call for educators to become mythologists can be seen as part of this struggle. Challenging myths in education is necessary for radical change as myths, for whatever other good they may do, will always impede (re)imagination.

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Jesse Bazzul is assistant professor in STEM education and teacher development at the Univer-sity of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His interdisciplinary work uses critical theory to explore issues in science and technology. He has taught science and mathematics in diverse settings, including China, Ukraine, and Canada.

Becoming a ‘Mythologist’: Barthes’ Mythologies and Education

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