Buffy The Vampire Slayer

BUFFY the vampire slayer is usually pretty good at looking after herself. Thanks to a handy arsenal of martial arts skills and pithy one-liners, she has vanquished demonic mayors, lipsticked hell-gods and - just to keep things interesting - the original evil.

But as the debate rages about whether postmodernism is replacing nits and dunny smoking as schools’ biggest scandal, Buffy’s name is repeatedly being taken in vain. The time has come to assemble the Scooby gang and help her fight back.

Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson is the latest Buffy basher. He reckons too many kiddies are studying the slayer instead of Milton "and stuff like that". Apparently this means Byron, Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Patrick White, Socrates and Aristotle (a rather diverse bunch to lump into one category, but presumably the nation’s top education official knows what he’s on about).

The vigorous scrutiny of our schools is to be applauded. Yet much of the argument involves an unhelpful either-or approach. Apparently we can have Charlotte Bronte or Big Brother. Plato or graffiti. The grating Emma from Jane Austen or the aggravating Cher Horowitz from Clueless.

Well, as a slavering fan of both Socrates and Buffy, here’s a novel suggestion: Can’t the modern student benefit from studying both the classic and the contemporaneous?

To get into the spirit of things, let’s apply some Socratic logic to the issue. As Nelson would no doubt be aware, step one of the Socratic method is to choose a statement widely regarded as common sense: "Studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a useless exercise worthy only of cappuccino courses, whereas reading Oedipus the King by Sophocles is not," for example.

Next on the philosophical agenda is to decide whether there are any situations where one’s statement does not hold true. What, for instance, if all those fans and academics are right and the Buffy series is indeed a groundbreaking work of spectacular depth and nuance? And what if its youth-friendly nature means students are more likely to stretch their craniums pondering its complex themes of destiny, duty and family?

By the same token, isn’t there a danger the more alien elements of Oedipus will cause young scholars to glaze over before realising it also contains the odd, interesting insight into these subjects? And isn’t there also a chance some students will be so repulsed by the whole killing your dad, rooting your mum, then stabbing your eyes out with a brooch business that they vow to steer clear of Sophocles "and stuff like that" altogether?

Socrates would have called for further investigation, if only to avoid a one-on-one physical confrontation with his new nemesis (Buffy’d whip his scruffy arse for sure).

Despite Nelson’s unholy obsession with caffeine, he does have at least part of a point when he points the finger at postmodernism. Gratuitous complexity, wanky jargon and a tendency for devotees to insist that its nothing-can-explain-everything theory is all-explanatory are just three of the heinous crimes on the rap sheet.

Yet postmodernism’s nibbling at the artificial divide between high and low culture makes a lot of sense. You only have to imagine what that old populist Shakespeare would have done if television had been an option when he was in the crowd-pleasing game.

As with the works of Shakespeare, Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be hilarious, gut-wrenching and immensely thought-provoking.

And - contrary to the notion that all products of postmodernism are devoid of values - it offers some extraordinarily old-fashioned conclusions about what it means to be a good person.

Characters are rewarded for selflessness, family fidelity and putting duty before hedonistic teenybopping. They’re punished for greed, betrayal and wanting to suck too much blood out of people’s throats while trying to destroy the world. Not very cappuccino-y at all when you think about it.

So give us Milton and his mates by all means. But anyone who tries to remove modern classics such as Buffy from the curriculum just because they were created in the 20th and 21st centuries and don’t have dusty pages deserves a good, hard, slaying.