ES 3219: Early Years Education, Week 4:

1. ES 3219: Early Years Education,Week 4: Foucault and the Technologies of Education

2. Foucault and the Technologies of Education “I don’t feel it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else you were not in the beginning.” Michel Foucault – philosopher, sociologist, intellectual (cited in Martin et al 1988, p. 9) Foucault’s themes: • the ways in which technologies endorse/perpetuate arbitrary models of humanity through the processes of ‘normalisation’ • power and dominance is achieved not through explicit coercion, but more subtle and intangible cultural processes. • there is no underlying ‘true’ humanity, humans are an ‘effect’ of power relations • the processes (‘technologies’) of power and domination.

3. Foucault and the Technologies of EducationDiscipline and Punish (1977) “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its own omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.” (Foucault, 1991: p. 170) • The discourses of schools and other institutions serve to define and perpetuate ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ behaviour through a process of discipline that is imposed simultaneously from a variety of sources, including the individual’s self-discipline; • In educational institutions, not only are the participants subject to the usual constraints of any social discourse, they are additionally involved in the propagation and selective dissemination of discourses for a variety of social contexts outside of education: “Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or modifying the appropriateness of discourses with the knowledge and power they bring with them.” (Foucault, 1971, p. 46)

4. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts Pouvoir-Savoir (power-knowledge) • Foucault contested the conventional view that acquisition of knowledge makes us more powerful, and stated that the relationship between power and knowledge is more complex than this. He proposed a more accurate representation of the relationship was the term pouvoir-savoir, which he believed more appropriately reflected the single, inseparable configuration of ideas and practices that constitute educational discourse.

5. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts Discipline • The Latin root of the word (disciplina) has a dual meaning: it refers both to an area of knowledge and to issues of control or power. • It can be used as a verb - to describe the actions one performs on oneself or others to achieve some degree of control; and as a noun - to describe a set of qualities that an individual needs to master in order to be recognised or valued within a particular field. • In both interpretations, discipline has negative and positive connotations.

6. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts Discipline (continued) • ‘Economy’ and ‘efficiency’ in disciplines are more important than the symbolism or language we use. • An economy of language or movement is all about the control we exercise over that language or movement & the way in which that control is part of a constellation of societal mechanisms or technologies which work in and through us. • The machinery/ mechanics/ technology of discipline work first and foremost at the level of the body.

7. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts Discipline (continued) • The workings of discipline operate at the micro-level, in the tiniest details of movement, arrangement and injunction. • Important to discipline are the techniques of individualising, ranking ordering and tabulating, spatially, administratively and in a multitude of other ways: “The organisation of serial space was one of the great technical mutations elementary education… by assigning individual places it made possible the supervision of each individual and the simultaneous work of all. It organised a new economy of the time of apprenticeship. It made the educational space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding.” (Foucault, 1977, p.147)

8. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts The Gaze • Mechanisms of observation, surveillance, visibility are important in the operation of disciplinary technique. • As with the other ‘disciplinary sites’, educational institutions operate a system of hierarchical observation, or surveillance that serves to control the participants’ attitudes and behaviours: “A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency.” (Foucault, 1977, p. 176)

9. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts The Gaze (continued) • The ‘gaze’ of surveillance is not simply directed at us by others, but also a way of looking at our own behaviours; • We become the objects of our own gaze, constantly monitoring our bodies, actions and feelings; • Surveillance is everywhere and at all times, it is both an external and an internal technology of discipline

10. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts The Gaze (continued) Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical “inventions” of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owes its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it… The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery… This enables the disciplinary power to be both absolutely indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert, since by its very principle it leaves no zone of shade and constantly supervises the very individuals who are entrusted with the task of supervising; and absolutely discreet, for it functions permanently and largely in silence.’ (Foucault, 1977: pp. 176-7)

11. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts Normalization “The Normal is established as a principle of coercion in teaching with the introduction of a standardized education” (Foucault, 1977; p. 184). • The education system monitors our progress, passes judgements on us and moulds our attitudes and behaviours in certain ways to ensure that this exercise of arbitrary power is largely undetectable, yet tacitly accepted.

12. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts Normalization (continued) • The punishment of misdemeanours and gratification of desirable behaviours ensures that the arbitrary definitions of behaviour as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ becomes, in the first instance, possible, then enforceable, and lastly, presumed to be ‘natural’ and incontestable; • The classification and ranking of individuals - their reward and punishment are taken as the normal or natural order of things.

13. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts Normalization (continued) ‘… the art of punishing, in the régime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor even precisely at repression. It brings five quite distinct operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals one from another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchises in terms of value the abilities, the level, the ‘nature’ of individuals. It introduces, through this ‘value-giving’ measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal. The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchises, homogenises, excludes. In short, it normalises.’ (Foucault, 1977, pp. 182-3)

14. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts The Examination “The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalising judgement. It is a normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualised.” (Foucault, 1991, p. 184) • Disciplinary techniques reach their educational pinnacle in the examination. • It is through the examination, the test, that the ‘economy of visibility’ is transformed into the exercise of power and of control.

15. Foucaultand the Technologies of EducationKey Concepts The Examination (continued) • The exercising of power has to do with knowledge, its ownership and transmission: “the examination in the school was a constant exchanger of knowledge; it guaranteed the movement of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil, but it extracted from the pupil a knowledge destined and reserved for the teacher.” (Foucault, 1991, p.187) • The examination holds teacher and pupil in ‘a mechanism of objectification’. Examinations lock into place the disciplines of the school, creating of them a ritual, a spectacle, a ceremony. Marks and scores ‘formalize’ or fix the child within power relationships.

16. Foucault and the Technology of Education Foucault and Early Years Education • To which possible areas of contemporary early years education could we apply Foucault’s concepts?

17. Foucault and the Technologies of EducationA Foucauldian account of Early Years Education • EYFSP assessment criteria: the EYFSP represents an apparatus in the disciplinary technology of schooling. It attempts to balance hierarchical & non-hierarchical criteria in a tabulature which, in practice serves to classify, rank, order and normalize. It’s 117 descriptors per pupil act as a regulatory framework , imposing an order on the learning and development of children. • Teachers’ performance. PM fulfils Foucault’s picture of a disciplinary technology beautifully. This ongoing process of target-setting, monitoring and reviewing casts the teacher in terms of criteria required to cross ‘thresholds’ which define their professional identity. Teachers are represented by their evidence-bases, objectified and recorded against scales and performance indicators.

18. Foucault and the Technologies of EducationA Foucauldian account of Early Years Education • Inspection regimes. In de-stabilising professional identities and re-casting teachers as supplicants before inspectors, EY Ofsteds have subjected us to a discipline which strikes at our sense of ourselves. The inspectoral ‘gaze’ not only coerces and regulates externally, but is internalised in the teachers’ and learners’ own fracturing and disruption. In this regard, is the move to the self-assessing school a reprieve or a final triumph of ‘visibility’? • Management regimes. Management regimes codify and enforce through the application of targets, incentives, monitoring of one’s colleagues, peer-review, etc. The EYFSP is an invaluable tool in the regulatory technologies of management.

19. Foucault and the Technologies of EducationA Foucauldian account of Early Years Education “Within this new mode of regulation, the organisation of power within definite forms of time-space … is now less important. It is the data-base, the appraisal meeting, the annual review, report writing and promotion applications, inspections, peer-reviews that are to the fore... it is the uncertainty and instability of being judged in different ways, by different means, by different agents; the ‘bringing off’ of performances – the flow of changing demands, expectations and indicators that make us continually accountable and constantly recorded…” (Ball, 1999, p.3)

20. References Ball, S. (1990) Foucault and Education, London : Routledge Ball, S. (1999) Performativities and Fabrications in the Education Economy: Towards the Performative Society, unpublished paper presented as the Tate memorial lecture and keynote address to the AARE annual conference, Melbourne, 1999 Foucault, M. (1971) L’order du discourse, Paris: Gallimard Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish, London : Penguin Martin, L., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P. (eds) (1988), Technologies of the Self London: Tavistock ES 3219: Early Years Education,Week 4: Foucault and the Technologies of Education Simon Boxley, 2009