The most effective weapon of the conservative Right over the past 10 years has been to manufacture an insidious "Howard hating" elite which controls our schools, our universities and the ABC, and to generate fear and loathing of these soft Left despicables among the "aspirational" classes out there in suburbia. Sir John must know in fact that business and economics courses are the dominant ones on campuses and that the last soft Left economist was seen there at about the time of John Maynard Keynes, but whatever, it's a good ploy and he'll go for it.

The latest Liberal policy statement, three days after his extravagant eulogies about the right-wing magazine Quadrant, is that we'll have a uniform national syllabus. Of course, there won't ever be one, as the federal Government is in no position to implement it, but the thought of such a syllabus under the control of the present Government is an interesting one. The first author to be banned for pushing ideological barrows would possibly be Charles Dickens because of his vicious attacks on the free market. After all, if eight-year-olds, after signing an appropriate workplace agreement, choose to work long hours for meagre wages in appalling conditions, the pay-off will be much cheaper consumer products for all of us.

Matching the Howard strut on the other side are the teachers and their associations and unions, and watching these two sides posture and hurl insults at each other is depressing. As in most cases when a lot of shouting is taking place, both sides are partly right, but they'd rather die honourably in battle than admit that their enemies have a case. Or half a case.

Although the debate has widened to include geography and history, the first and core battleground of the postmodernist revolution remains literature. And Sir John is right to pour scorn on some of its excesses. I did so myself in my play, Dead White Males. The postmodernist claim that imaginative literature contains propaganda or ideology, often subtle, pushing sexist, xenophobic, racist, political or social points of view is irrefutable.

Shakespeare, in some of his work, was notably sexist and in others toadied up to the power elites of his time. It's hard not to see The Taming of the Shrew as delivering a message that highly intelligent, feisty women such as Katharina can only find true happiness when subdued by a masterful, no-nonsense Petruchio, or to see Shakespeare's hatchet job on Richard III as blackening the York dynasty to curry favour with the Tudors.

The postmodernist project, to allow students to discern the ways in which words are manipulating them, is not without worth. Unmasking ideology brings one a little closer to the objective truth.

But ideology is not all that great writing contains. The forces of Howard are right to claim that it also contains our greatest repository of wisdom about human nature. Richard III is a biased distortion of the truth at one level, but the political manipulations that Richard engages in could be a primer for any politician on their way to power, and while the outcome of The Taming of the Shrew might be sexist, the hard-fought but delightful battle of the sexes engaged in before Petruchio triumphs uses the same manoeuvres feisty courting couples still display.

The postmodern assertion that our natures are created by the ideologies around us is only partly true. We have also been created by millions of years of evolution, which have left us with powerful guiding emotions that are triggered by very similar events down the ages. We understand immediately the rage of Medea when her husband leaves her for another woman in a play written thousands of years ago. The Icelandic sagas, written about life in the 11th century, have plotlines of families jousting for power and prestige that echo the plotlines of Dynasty.

Perhaps the simplest solution to the culture war posturing would be to have two separate areas of study. Rhetoric, which examines the way words manipulate, and story, which would allow access to the accumulated human wisdom of great writers and film-makers, past and contemporary.

David Williamson is a screenwriter and playwright whose most recent productions include Charitable Intent, Operator and Influence.