Pandering to Narcissus, the God of Youth and Pseudo Arts Education Infected by Managerialism

Education and Western culture has certainly transformed from being an anti-youth authoritarian regime to being a subservient pandering culture of acknowledging and the extolling of Narcissus as a god of Youth. Child centred education is not simply about finding the best way of motivating learning. It is becoming an abdication of competency and academic mastery in favour of sycophantic adherence to a doctrine of bowing to ignorance and a god of Narcissus!

In science, will we have scientists bowing to the Sun God or some other archaic explanation for the meaning of everything and the creation of the universe? Are we simply leaving it to a generation to decide on, and with limited experience and knowledge, the whole background of knowledge and development made over hundreds of years? Is the French philosopher, Foucault and Post Modern philosophers to be the new gate-keepers of all assessment of knowledge? And where is Artaud listening and screaming from some unseen and silent hole? Yes, slightly metaphorical! But for art and theatre this is very relevant. I say it; therefore I am ...

Theatre and Narcissus

So many kids get into theatre after their grandparents praised their genius in pre-school. Unfortunately, this praise leads to conceited belief in its own genius; because it is said, then it is true. This foundation for belief is the horrifying force of 21st century adherence and cultural base line. It is the foundation on many of our cultural platforms. We even have youth theatres with adolescent theatre reviewers who know very little about historical shaping of arts and theatre smugly providing their ignorant and narcissistic proclamations on what is the GOOD! How cool is this! Yeah! It is perhaps great for influencing kids on what might attract them to theatre! But to offer any kind of assessment of some notion of cultural significance in an historical and artistic vein is purely absurd. But the absurdity is more when looking at Government sponsored education departments creating arts curriculums.

Take a look at the hiring by educational government departments of academics with seeming tunnel-visioned PHd degrees shaping arts courses and drama units for educational institutions while having little real grounding in the fields relevant to the study. Prime example is the ACT Board of Senior Secondary Studies Arts curriculum! It would even make Kafka weep. A bizarre semantic hotch-potch of word plays that use the buzz terms of ideological claptrap to justify and frame a paradigm for study that would make Foucault proud .

At best the ACT BSSS provoked Arts curriculum is a document that seems to support elements of racial integration and redefinitions of arts inspirations and outcomes. In effect it is a waffling amalgam of buzz words and sympathies meaning that each unit has no parameters; resulting in almost the same material being propagated in each of the specified units; only in different casings.

The idea that the arts courses reflect a conceptual sociological reality is a farce! The arts courses, especially Drama, are like the off-springs of Narcissus and Doctor Pangloss from the French revolutionary period of Candide.

Idealism, youth and the professorial class of semantic superiorists seem to have out-manoeuvred any genuine discussion and strategizing of arts education and practice. Like the fallacious notion of child-centred education and its narcissistic obvious ramifications, the ACT Arts curriculum seems implosive and culturally and academically designed to destroy the very essence of what was created so effectively in the ACT back in the 1970s to the 2000s.

Off-Springs of Narcissus and Doctor Pangloss

When you know very little but have had a taste of knowing something you might feel you know everything you need to know. As a child in Grade 2, I knew I could write and do basic maths. I could read. So I felt, and I remember articulating this to myself at Mary Immaculate Primary School in Annerley, Brisbane, in 1958. I remember thinking and articulating: what more is there to know in order to survive!

I remember a Year 9 student telling a NIDA lecturer how to teach Drama at a workshop at Daramalan in the mid 2000s. The student had performed poorly in Drama in class, but felt enabled to tell a NIDA tutor how Theatre and Drama worked ... I get this every year as American TV brainwashed students tell me what should be done in theatre and drama studies and in the selection of productions for the theatre company. Highest on the list of suggestions would be "Moma Mia" and "High School Musical" with "Mean Girls" in close. "Heathers" would rate highly as well. Nothing wrong with these shows. But how many students realise how complex and demanding these works actually are and how many would question the purpose of producing these shows in a school?

Plays that promote Narcissistic personalities always have popular appeal amongst students as the characters are strong and identifiable. They allow insecure kids to project on to the characters their own situations. This is probably quite valuable. Certainly, it might provide a reason to select such works for school productions. However, the best of all worlds is not necessarily the right choice in education and the arts. Indeed, the very notion of the arts as providing potential windows into culture, society and the relationships between people is being bled by a strange culture of pandering to managerialism disguised indirectly as platitudinous child-centred education.

The Risk Matrix of Original Sin

The ACT BSSS responsible for controlling the senior secondary section of education in the ACT, Australia, has just begun implementing an Orwellian style control mechanism placing all teacher and school compliance as a "risk" factor: low risk, high risk and more. Each teacher might be doing an acceptable job in the arts education area, only to be graded by a Managerial class of unseen bureaucrats as being a risk option. It means that there is a matrix that is triggered by anonymous persons that might well determine the acceptance of a school's or teacher's competency or/and success; but starting with a twisted notion of original sin; risk!

To get a better understanding of this new menace to cultural challenge and educational practice, I suggest one reads very closely Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon"! And if you think this novel is a total exaggeration, then study closely the personalities of those who you know who control the Risk Matrix of Original Sin that is now going into operation in the nation's capital! If you are a teacher, you quite possibly know these personalities.

The onus is put on teachers to show they are NOT GUILTY or they acknowledge the god of Bureaucracy that commands their every action and being. They have to acknowledge that they are a risk! Infected with some notion of original sin against the BSSS or against the very clientele they serve! The Arts Curriculum is served up for teachers in a most obscure and mediocre document with such vague notions and content obscurity, even absurdity, that provides the Managerial class of Education the ability to wield an unnatural power over the assessment and moderation of such courses. Nothing is precise; everything is potentially a source of admonishment. The people likely to be most affected are the most competent in their areas; reason being their unwillingness to bow down to these gods of mediocrity! And perhaps, their high positions in their schools preclude their defiance and standing for a more ethically and educationally proficient stand!

It also means students, who should be the main beneficiaries of these Arts courses are left in limbo seeking out the discourse of cynicism while devoid of any ability to link with any sense of arts mission. So they cling to the comfort of intimacy directives and reductionism of art into tick-boxes of approval; all such activity being anathemas to any real sense of artistic courage and risk taking! The gods of managerialism have affectively killed the potential energy of youth as a force for cultural enrichment and change beyond narcissistic gratification and gravitation to whatever enticement strikes them at any moment. Where is the deeper foundation within courses that might expand the very psyche of young people and their commitment within art? Where will the teachers be found who will buck the hegemony of Stalinist proclaimers of control over the careers and providers of theatre, drama, dance, music, visual art and the very notion of society's licensed fool?

The Dr Pangloss absurdity of the best of all worlds being emphasised in education neglects education as a source of untriggered warnings and revelations for our cultural masters and indeed for our growing generations. Narcissism combined with the risk ridden emphasis in arts curriculum can only lead to the implosion of critical and creative thinking and the rise of mediocre and fanciful narratives being articulated without wisdom or historical learning. Bowing to the deceptive idealism of youth and the replacement of reality with semantics to placate the unseen hand of bureaucracy is currently proving to be a lesson in disaster and the reduction of arts practice into irrelevancy.

Joe Woodward

May 2026

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