Abstract
This chapter explores education as one nexus of Foucault’s three vectors of analysis or ‘aspects of experience’—truth, power, and subjectivity. It further considers how the changing emphases between these vectors in Foucault’s oeuvre can enable us to think about education differently. I put these vectors to work in relation to a exploratory and very provisional genealogy of pedagogy and the school. Finally, the chapter discusses what such analyses mean in terms of education as a philosophical practice, and suggests, as far as the early and mid period work of Foucault is concerned, in relation to his strident anti-humanism, that education is impossible.
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Notes
- 1.
Perhaps, as Patrick Bailey suggested to me, this points up the tension in Foucault’s work between his historical narratives of power and the analyses of complexes of power—dispositifs.
- 2.
In addition Foucault’s later work address education in the classical period in a number of ways.
- 3.
An episteme is the system of concepts that defines knowledge for a given intellectual era, the conditions of possibility for knowledge. What Foucault also called the ‘intellectual subconscious’ of scientific disciplines.
- 4.
It is in relation to the struggles and conflicts around such exclusion that the political force of knowledge (Hook 2007). Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. p. 142) comes into view.
- 5.
This 4th lecture was published separately (Green 1998). Born-Again Teaching? Governmentality, “Grammar” and Public Schooling. In T.S. Popkewitz & M. Brennan (Eds.), Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Kowledge and Power in Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Its take-up gave impetus to what is sometimes called ‘governmentality studies’ which is one of the most widespread and productive fields in which Foucault’s work has been taken forward.
- 6.
At the end of this fourth lecture Foucault adds a coda which links this new form of analysis back to the work he undertook in The Order of Things on the emergence of the modern human sciences—biology, economics and linguistics. He suggests that ‘a constant interplay between techniques of power and their object gradually carves out in reality, as a field of reality, population and its specific phenomena. A whole series of objects were made visible for possible forms of knowledge …’ (1970, p. 79). Specifically, the possibilities for knowledges of man; the human subject is a 19th Century production for it is then ‘that human forces confront purely finitary forces—life, production, language—in such a way that the resulting composite is a form of Man’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 99). Here is another point of intersection between archaeology and genealogy. In Security, Territory and Population—where Foucault suggests a recontextualisation of the core themes of The Order of Things and indeed also revisits, in an unusually direct way, part of the agenda of his 1970 inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse, Foucault rapidly outlines a view of how the changing regimes of knowledge of life, labour and language respectively entered into, and became stakes in historico-political debates and struggles over race, class and nation.
- 7.
In The Order of Things, Foucault is concerned primarily with three disciplines that emerged in the nineteenth century: philology, biology, and economics.
- 8.
I do recognise that pedagogy fails many of the ‘tests’ of coherence that Foucault suggests for what might be considered a human science. He was interested in disciplines on the ‘threshold of scientificity’ (1972, pp. 186–89), a threshold that pedagogy may never have crossed.
- 9.
He goes on to say ‘in contrast with the ceremony in which status, birth privilege, function are manifested with all the spectacle of their marks’, and yet the history of the sociological analysis of schooling rests exactly on the continuation of the play of privilege in relation to judgement and achievement.
- 10.
The celebrations of great teachers remain rooted in personality and morality, in belief and trust and expectations rather than in science.
- 11.
Henriques, Hollway et al. (2005, pp. 166–168) outline some aspects of shifts from a monitorial to what I have called an early modern pedagogy (pp. 166–168).
- 12.
This is as Foucault argues, the duality of man—as both an object in the world, an object of study, and an experiencing subject through which the world is constituted.
- 13.
11+ Norwood etc.
- 14.
Progressive education is a pedagogical movement that began in the late nineteenth century; it has persisted in various forms to the present. Progressive education can be traced back to the works of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both of whom are known as forerunners of ideas that would be developed by theorists such as John Dewey.
- 15.
The Plowden Report is the unofficial name for the 1967 report of the Central Advisory Council For Education (England) into Primary education in England. The report, entitled Children and their Primary Schools reviewed Primary education in a wholesale fashion.
- 16.
To some extent Foucault was part of this new logic and his writing contributed to liberatory moves especially as it was taken up within the anti-psychiatry movement.
- 17.
Bernstein goes on to adumbrate a set of variations or modes within the general model (progressive, populist and radical)—I am interested in the model rather than the modes here. But he says all three share a preoccupation with the development, the recognition and change of consciousness (p. 68). He goes on in this chapter, again with resonances of Foucault to discuss the relationship of pedagogy, to transitional capitalism and the concomitant ‘possibility of new identity constructions’ (p. 76).
- 18.
- 19.
‘This book chronicles the teachers’ (of WT) attempt to make their school a more open and humane institution, a place where the children could learn to take an active and responsible role in their own education, and where the teachers could decide in democratic ways on their methods of work’ (Back cover William Tyndale The teachers’ story (1976) Readers and writers Publishing Cooperative.
- 20.
See https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/aug/25/guardianobituaries.obituaries, on Holland Park’s first Headteacher Allen Clarke.
- 21.
Bernstein acknowledges the possibility of a relation of his analysis to Foucault in Chap. 3 (1996, p. 54) of PSCI.
- 22.
I will come back to this shift in Foucault’s conceptualization of power in Chap. 3.
- 23.
Foucault does not offer a definition of truth; rather he provides a multi-faceted characterization (Prado 2006, p. 81).
- 24.
Although it is exactly in these terms, at a pervious historical conjuncture, that Foucault outlines the methods of discipline (1979, pp. 220–223).
- 25.
Nonetheless, of course, what is happening is that prisons and hospitals are also made subject to these reforms, which re-establishes a new resemblance between them, and between them and school.
- 26.
In October 2014, the Welcome Trust and Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) announced the launch of six projects to investigate a variety of ways in which neuroscience might improve teaching and learning in the UK. Thousands of pupils across England will take part in a series of randomised controlled trials after the funding bodies identified a need for more robust evidence about how neuroscience relates to learning in order to support teachers and schools keen to use the science. The six projects have been awarded grants totalling almost £4 million. http://www.cne.psychol.cam.ac.uk/news/educationneuroscience.
- 27.
- 28.
See Grant (1997).
- 29.
Interestingly, in relation to pastoral power, Illich draws a parallel between the medieval priest and the promise of life after death and the modern teacher promising life after school.
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Ball, S.J. (2017). The Impossibility of Education. In: Foucault as Educator. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50302-8_1
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