Deacon – Foucault on Education
Questions
1.
Three themes – how do we generalize these as ways
of reading Foucault (interpretation strategies) or how do we do philosophy
through Foucault with these strategies? (177)
2.
What is the relation of power and liberty (practices
of)? (184)
3.
How should we understand the transformation of teacher-centered
to student=centered approaches which has merely reformulated the relations of
power? (185)
4.
How can this help us understand schooling/education
in other types of disciplinary institutions (e.g. prison)?
5.
What would it mean to think of these strategies
in, or as, colonization (context of the colonies)? (182)
6.
What does he have in mind when he refers to the concrete
empirical investigation (184)?
7.
How does the changing role of the family relate to
or modify the three themes identified by Deacon? (!78)
Discussion
Gore – School settings. What can we make of this method? How
can we evaluate what Foucault is saying?
Issue with the lecture-setting (in contrast to the seminar
setting) and Foucault’s naiveté about him not exercising power.
What does he mean by domination? What would it mean to call
the classroom a space of domination if the power relations within the classroom
are reciprocal?
Foucault’s statement about lecture-setting is a hypothesis
(is Foucault right?) and that would require an empirical investigation. That
prompts the further question: what kinds of investigations can we do? That
could help us see how surveillance changes in different context.
Problem with Deacon: unclear with certain terms such as domination
and relation to the ways in which Foucault uses them. Could we think of positive/productive
understanding of domination (e.g. a “school of subjection”)?
Archive of education is interesting because theories (e.g.
Montessori) and discourses are always developed with explicit references to
techniques, spaces, etc.?
How could we test Foucault’s (according to Deacon) that
schooling is actually not freedom? How could we evaluate this? Is it possible?
Three themes – what are the different ways we might use
Foucault to answer some question we have about educational practices?
|
METHODS |
CATEGORIES |
|
Genealogy (of
the school) |
Disciplinary
power |
|
Microphysics
of power (e.g. sociological) but not necessarily genealogical or historical |
Disciplinary
power |
|
Political
implications (e.g. normative political critique, predictive study, data
analytics, counter-counduct) |
Block of
capacity‑communication-power |
