Foucault and education: Disciplines and knowledge

by Stephen J. Ball (Contributor)

First published in 1990, this book was the first to explore Foucault's work in relation to education, arguing that schools, like prisons and asylums, are institutions of moral and social regulation, complex technologies of disciplinary control where power and knowledge are crucial. Original and challenging, the essays assess the relevance of Foucault's work to educational practice, and show how the application of Foucauldian analysis to education enables us to see the politics of educational reform in a new light.

Genres: Education, Philosophy

213 pages, Hardcover

First published December 21, 1990

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m reading more Foucault at the moment than I had really intended – I’m almost finished Discipline and Punish, which I’m finding really amazing. But this was interesting too as I haven’t really read a lot of commentary on Foucault. Most of what I’ve read has been by him, rather than about him. So, this helped to fill in some gaps. It is an interesting read as it helps place him – as far as such a thinker is able to be placed.

Although Foucault didn’t really write a book on education as such, so many of his books are directly about how to make ‘docile’ bodies that you could argue education was about all he wrote about. Docile is a particularly interesting word, as its original meaning was ‘ready to learn’. The other word that is interesting to think about here is discipline. Discipline has always had two meanings – a discipline (a course of study – like physics is a discipline) and discipline as the act of controlling someone. Understanding the various meanings of being docile and discipline could probably take you quite some way to understanding Foucault. He is interested in power, but we tend to think of power as something negative – power as imposed on others, as subjection. To Foucault, power is inevitable and has positive implications too. It is related to knowledge – in fact, power relations help to decide what will count as knowledge and knowledge (and who gets to share in knowledge) are good ways to understand who has power over whom.

But I think I’ll leave a fuller explanation of this stuff for my review of Discipline and Punish – which became urgent to read once I’ve finished this one. It is constantly referred to throughout and for good reason. Schools are sites where power and knowledge are articulated and brought to the fore. As such they provide a wonderful place to test some of Foucault’s key ideas.

The best of this book – the bit I will remember for a long time – is Jane Kenway’s final piece of Foucaultian and Gramscian analysis of the relationship between private and public schools in Australia, particularly the discourse that surrounds these. To understand how good this is requires a little more information about what Foucault tends to do in his research.

There is a relationship, for Foucault, between truth, knowledge, power and what we might call social relationships. Foucault refers to all of this as a discourse. A discourse to Foucault isn’t just what is said, but how ideas become constituted in our lives. Foucault gets down and dirty in the sense that he sees what he calls 'regimes of truth' as being literally marked on our bodies. His ideas of discourse include things like architecture and what our choice of such architecture says about how our bodies are expected to behave in spaces. That is, discourses include all of our lives and all of the various ways our lives are shaped and controlled by the environment we find ourselves in.

Let me give you a case in point. Most libraries I’ve ever gone into have the librarian’s table somewhere close to the entrance. This isn’t only to encourage you to ‘ask a librarian’ but to ensure you enter the library in a way that will respect the sanctity of the place. Brighton Library, the one closest to where I live and Deakin Library (my uni library) even have an air lock - like a little entrance hall with two sets of doors separating the inside from the outside - as a way of announcing entrance to this space of learning. The space – the architecture – is designed to enforce appropriate behaviour within that space. There may also be signs with fingers to lips and Shhh! written on them – but often this isn’t really necessary, as the space as a text is explicit enough on its own.

Now, most spaces like this have histories and have changed over time. To understand how something IS it is not enough to look at it as it is NOW, you must understand how it got here. Discourses have histories. However, we can’t really go back in time to understand these histories – so, histories are what we write now so as to understand the present.

And this is pretty much what Jane Kenway does in her piece on private schools. She tracks the discourse of government funding for private schools in Australia. That is, she provides the contextual history in which this occurred. Then she looks at how those with power – the Labour government in the first place, but more importantly the media and the private school lobby – create a discourse that justifies their actions. What is particularly fascinating in this article is how language is used (twisted to what ought to be a point beyond breaking point) to support self-interest. Elite private schools are being put on a ‘hit list’, the parents who send their kids to these schools are battlers that truly love their children. They are the ones who make sacrifices to have choices. The government schools are wasteful and inefficient – effectively bad schools where (never quite said) bad parents send their kids – private schools are innovative, well-managed and models to be copied. The Orwellian inversions here are terrifying. Kenway is masterful in her deconstruction of this language and makes it clear that we are being presented with a hegemonic discourse that defines power relations and the field of truth within the Australian education system. It really is a powerful story told by someone with a very keen eye.

[Tobi ﾄﾋﾞ · Rating 4 out of 5]

ive finally decided i don’t like foucault despite the amount of books i’ve read about him the last few days

[Sue Lyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen ball is probably my favourite sociologist of education and this book didn't disappoint. At the bottom line it is a reflection on his own autobiography as a scholar and how he has been influenced by foucault's ideas towards the end of his academic life. To have this kind of insight into the working mind of one of our greatest educationalists is inspirational and provides an example of critical reflective practice in action. To do this he has to explain some of foucault's key ideas which he does very lucidly and then uses them to critique education policy, his main area of expertise. The book provides an insight into how to apply Foucault's ideas and methods, a kind of toolkit for researchers. I particularly liked the way he demonstrates how discourses of race are embedded in all thinking about schooling. His explication of how testing has been used to classify, separate and regulate children right from the beginning of compulsory schooling has particular resonance as the regimes of testing have come to dominate every aspect of education under neo-liberalism. The book overall is like a series of thought experiments into some of Foucault's key ideas. I would love him to do another book focusing on ethics, the ideas which Foucault was working on at the end of his life.