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From Confinement to Attachment: Michel Foucault on the Rise of the School

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10848770600587896

1470-1316

Roger Deacon,

Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Abstract This article develops a Foucauldian account of the rise of the modern school, on the basis of a thorough examination of all references to education in Foucault's work. It analyses the seventeenth-century origins of mass schooling and traces its development up to the nineteenth century. It identifies several overlapping stages in this multifaceted and largely contingent development, particularly a fundamental shift from a negative to a positive conception of the school. This Foucauldian understanding of the rise of schooling as a disciplinary technology suggests that an initial focus on the exclusion or confinement of disorderly groups was gradually superseded by a focus on the inclusion or "attachment" of diverse individuals and on the development of their potential. It concludes by cautioning against over-simplistic applications of Foucault's work to the field of education. Acknowledgements This article is based upon research supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) under Grant No. 2053478. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the NRF or anyone else. Notes Notes 1. Only in two early 1970s texts—the first an interview, and the second a general discussion—does Foucault focus primarily and almost exclusively on education: "J. K. Simon: A Conversation with Michel Foucault," Partisan Review 38.2 (1971): 192–201, and "Revolutionary Action: 'Until Now,' " in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977). In three other works, all dating from the mid-1970s, educational issues figure prominently though only in specific sections: the best known of these is Part 3 of Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1986). The others are a lecture given in Brazil, "Truth and Juridical Forms," in Power, vol. 3 of The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), and an interview on French radio, "Talk Show," in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotexte, 1996). Finally, there are a few scattered passages referring to aspects of education in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987); "The Subject and Power," Afterword to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester, 1982); "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault," Philosophy and Social Criticism, 12.2/3 (1987): 112–31; and "Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia" (tape recordings of six lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, October–November 1983: BdS n§ D213), ed. Joseph Pearson [1985; Re-Ed. Webmasters, 1999 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University) http://perso.club-internet.fr/kmille/discourse.htm. 2. For example: Stephen Ball, ed., Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1990); and Thomas Popkewitz and Marie Brennan, eds, Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education (New York: Teachers College, 1998). 3. Roger Deacon, Fabricating Foucault: Rationalising the Management of Individuals (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2003). 4. The last two areas mentioned are not discussed here in any detail, but have recently been subjected to closer investigation: see Roger Deacon, "Moral Orthopedics: A Foucauldian Account of Schooling as Discipline," Telos 130 (Spring 2005): 84–102, and "Capacity–Communication–Power: Foucault on Contemporary Education," Perspectives in Education 23.2 (2005): 73–83. For an account of the centrality of the pedagogical relationship to the rise of Western political rationalities in general, see Roger Deacon, "Truth, Power and Pedagogy: Michel Foucault and the Rise of the Disciplines," Educational Philosophy and Theory 34.4 (2002): 435–58. 5. Margaret Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems (London: Sage, 1979); Ellwood Cubberley, The History of Education (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1948), http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8hsed10.txt; Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA (London: Macmillan, 1990); and Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (St. Leonard's: Allen & Unwin, 1994). 6. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 139, 170. 7. Michel Foucault, "About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth," Political Theory 21.2 (1993): 203. 8. Michel Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of 'Political Reason,' " in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values II, ed. Sterling McMurrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 254, 227. 9. Deacon, "Truth, Power and Pedagogy," 436–42. 10. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), 105. 11. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 173; Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Božovič (London: Verso, 1995), 87. 12. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 85. 13. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 121. 14. Ibid., 161, 315, 209–10, 146–47, 315 n. 8; Foucault, "Discourse and Truth," n.p. 15. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Discipline and Punish, and "Truth and Juridical Forms." 16. Foucault's use of terms like "negative" and "positive" here should not be taken to endorse a progressive history of schooling, as if early modern schools slowly but steadily became less coercive, restrictive and exclusive and more free, open and inclusive (or vice versa, for that matter). On the contrary, Foucault rejected both a "progressivist" and a "regressivist" history (Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 164). While the history of early modern schooling can be said to be coherent, such coherence "does not derive from the revelation of a project but from a logic of opposing strategies" [Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 61]. Schools have at all times, in all contexts and to a greater or lesser extent promoted the interests of "society"—but "society" has never been unified, homogenous or free of conflict, let alone self-conscious. Depending on context, the shift from negative to positive forms of schooling as a disciplinary mechanism is thus a matter of degree, with an overwhelming emphasis on confining, excluding and physically coercing groups in the seventeenth century and much more stress on attaching, including and psychologically manipulating individuals in the contemporary world. 17. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001), 36–41. 18. Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling for the People: Comparative Local Studies of Schooling History in France and Germany, 1750–1850 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985). 19. Karin Jones and Kevin Williamson, "The Birth of the Schoolroom," Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 59–110. 20. Green, Education and State Formation. 21. David Ransel, "Russia and the USSR," in Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide, ed. Joseph Hawes and Ray Hiner (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 472. 22. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 209. 23. Carmen Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood (Albany: SUNY, 1989), 44. 24. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 210. 25. Martin Luther, in Classics in Education, ed. Wade Baskin (London: Vision, 1966), 374. 26. Edward VI, "Discourse on Reform of Abuses in Church and State" (1551), in The Chronicle and Political Papers of Edward VI, ed. W. K. Jordan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 165; Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 58. 27. Lawrence Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640," Past and Present 28 (1964): 71. 28. Jones and Williamson, "The Birth of the Schoolroom," 82; see also Eric Hopkins, Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 129–30. 29. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 141. 30. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 42. 31. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 231; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), 157–58. 32. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 169; see also A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1987), 9 and 110. 33. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 141, 143, respectively. 34. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 172. 35. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 47. 36. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 121–22. 37. Ibid., 218. 38. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 168. 39. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 219. On similar criticisms directed at eighteenth-century prisons, see Ibid., 114. On how such criticisms still apply to twenty-first century schools, see Roger Deacon and Ben Parker, "The Schooling of Citizens, or the Civilizing of Society?" in The University, Globalization, Central Europe, ed. Marek Kwiek (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003), 117–19. 40. Montaigne, in Classics in Education, ed. Baskin, 460–61. 41. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 174. 42. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, 31–33; Shulamit Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990), 173. 43. Such as Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1960), 41, and Ibn Khaldun, An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332–1406) (London: John Murray, 1950), 161. 44. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 74. 45. Ibid., 78–79, 82. 46. Ibid., 91. 47. Émile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 178–79. 48. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 76–78. 49. Foucault, Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 105; Discipline and Punish, 141. 50. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136. 51. Ibid., 11. 52. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 72–73. 53. Foucault, "Disciplinary Power and Subjection," in Power, ed. Steven Lukes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 236. 54. Norbert Elias, State Formation and Civilization, vol. 2 of The Civilising Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 86; Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England," 70. 55. Weber, The Protestant Ethic. 56. James Ross, "The Middle-Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century," in The History of Childhood: The Evolution of Parent–Child Relationships as a Factor in History, ed. Lloyd de Mausse (London: Souvenir, 1976). 57. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 60–62; Discipline and Punish, 213. 58. See Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems; Maury Feld, The Structure of Violence: Armed Forces as Social Systems (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977); Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988); James Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, Triumphall Shews: Tournaments at German-Speaking Courts and their European Context, 1560–1730 (Berlin: Mann, 1992); and Frances Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: University of London Press, 1947). 59. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 61, 63, respectively. 60. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 213. 61. Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatim," 249; The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock, 1976), 25–26; Power/Knowledge, 170–71; Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick Hutton (London: Tavistock, 1988), 156; Charles Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European State-Making," in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 60. 62. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 215. 63. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 67; Discipline and Punish, 214. 64. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 63–64. 65. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 215. 66. Ibid. 67. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 139. 68. Ibid., 26, 104; Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), 116. Foucault, in tandem with others like Norbert Elias and Liah Greenfeld, dates the first substantial manifestations of nationalism during the late seventeenth century, subsequent to the consolidation of European absolutist monarchies in the face of rearguard struggles by an increasingly pacified or co-opted nobility, though Greenfeld detects its first glimmerings as early as the 1530s in England, in the form of the rise of an Henrician aristocracy who derived their status, interestingly, more from education than from birth. See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 47–48; Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), 134; Elias, The Civilising Process, 105; and Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 149. However, it was only at the end of the eighteenth century, according to Foucault, that the national state's biopolitical focus on entire populations began to mesh with existing disciplinary technologies ("Society Must Be Defended," 249–50). 69. Foucault, "Talk Show," 89. 70. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 77, 79, 77–78, respectively. 71. Ibid., 67. 72. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 124. 73. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 78–79. 74. Ibid., 75, 76, respectively. 75. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 210–11. 76. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 56. 77. Ibid., 56–57. 78. Michael Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500–1820 (Brighton: Harvester, 1981). 79. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 57, emphasis in the original. 80. Jones and Williamson, "The Birth of the Schoolroom," 82, 86, respectively. 81. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 160–61. 82. Michel Foucault, "Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault," Ideology and Consciousness 8 (1981): 14. 83. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 28. 84. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 209. 85. Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," 83. 86. Ibid., 57; Discipline and Punish, 10. 87. As suggested above, Foucault improves on Ariès's over-simple history of childhood by suggesting that concepts of childhood did indeed exist before the modern era but were understood differently. Childhood was not invented by modernity, but it was reconceptualized. 88. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 159; "Power and Sex: An Interview with Michel Foucault," Telos 32 (1977): 154. 89. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 187. For a detailed treatment of the issues raised in this paragraph, see Deacon, "Moral Orthopedics." 90. Foucault, "Questions of Method," 9. 91. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 224.