Truth, Power and Pedagogy: Michel Foucault on the rise of the disciplines

Michel Foucault sought to understand how and why it is that people in the West, in their arduous and incessant search for truth, have also built into and around themselves intricate and powerful systems intended to manage all that they know and do. While little of Foucault's work directly conce...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEducational philosophy and theory Vol. 34; no. 4; pp. 435 - 458
Main Author Deacon, Roger
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Taylor & Francis Group 01.11.2002
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Wiley-Blackwell
Subjects
Christianity
Discipline
Discourse Analysis
Educational Philosophy
Ethics
Foucault, Michel
History
Knowledge (Theory)
Pastoralism
Political rationality
Politics
Power (Philosophy)
Power Structure
Punishment
Religion
Schools
Self Concept
Teaching Methods
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Summary:Michel Foucault sought to understand how and why it is that people in the West, in their arduous and incessant search for truth, have also built into and around themselves intricate and powerful systems intended to manage all that they know and do. While little of Foucault's work directly concerns itself with the historically recent phenomenon of mass-based, school-centred, state-sponsored education, it is argued in this article that it is both possible and useful to distil from Foucault's "oeuvre" an account of the centrality of the pedagogical relationship to the rise of western political rationalities, from ancient times to the present. This account, of the historical interweaving of "relations of discourse, of power, of everyday life and of truth", not only revises the manner in which one might understand the past; it also sheds light on issues of contemporary educational significance. A significant finding of Foucault's work is that the processes whereby some people discipline or govern others are frequently closely connected to procedures of identity-constitution or self-discipline. In this article, the author talks about Michel Foucault's views of truth, power and pedagogy on the rise of the disciplines.
Bibliography:Educational Philosophy and Theory, v.34, no.4, Nov 2002: (435)-458
ISSN:0013-1857
1469-5812
DOI:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2002.tb00518.x