1. SOCIOL 316: Critical Theories of Schooling
Week 7: Foucauldian Theory
Lecturer: Dr Bruce Cohen

2. Last Lecture / Tutorial
Althusser: education system as Ideological State Apparatus (ISA).
Transmission of ruling class values and ‘interpellation’ of the masses.
Bourdieu: symbolic violence of education system
School reflects interests of dominant class, reproducing current social structure.
Last Lecture / Tutorial

3. This Lecture Background Discipline and Punish
Schools as Moral Institutions
Biopower and Neoliberalism
The Medicalization of School Pupils
Criticisms
Essay 2: Introduction and Q&A

4. Background: Michel Foucault
“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”

5. Discipline and Punish: From Confinement to Institutionalisation
Modern institutions: exclusion to inclusion; group-centredness to individual-centredness; ‘harsh’ to ‘mild’ practices; ‘negative’ to ‘positive’ conceptions of discipline.
Places of confinement: observation, surveillance, classification, hierarchy, rules, discipline, social control.
From forced confinement to self-imposed discipline.

6. Schools as Moral Institutions
The ‘disciplinarization’ of the schools system means that punishment has shifted from the public and spectacular to the personal and mundane.
Foucault: there now resides ‘a judicial power within the school’.
Schools instill a moral discipline onto its inmates and differentiates between them on this basis.
Schools as Moral Institutions

7. Example: Conscious Discipline
“Conscious Discipline is a whole-school solution for social-emotional learning, discipline and self-regulation.”
(see

8. Biopower and Neoliberalism
Neoliberal philosophy proposes, “that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” (Harvey 2005: 2)
As the market must to be ‘freed’ from constraints, so must individuals…
Rose (1996: ): people have become “enterprising individuals”; subjects embedded with the core values of neoliberalism.

9. Small group work (20 minutes)
Identify the dual meanings of ‘power’ for Foucault…
…In what way does this understanding of power differ from a Marxist analysis of power?
According to Ball, what is the key site of neoliberal governance?
Give examples of how teachers ‘refuse’ neoliberal governance.
Any criticisms, issues or comments on Ball’s article (or Foucault’s ideas in general)?
Small group work (20 minutes)

10. Medicalization of School Pupils
“School classrooms have had and still have an intimate connection to the origination and the diagnosis of ADHD” (Christian 1997: 34)
“most of the behaviours listed [for ADHD in the DSM] are connected to (and one could even argue contingent upon) the demands of schooling.” (Graham 2008: 23)
“The last thing someone with untreated ADHD wants to do is go to school.” (special education teacher, cited in Rafalovich 2004: 111)

11. Criticisms Ambivalent on the distribution of power.
Ultimate Relativist?
Over-pessimistic? Over-optimistic?!

12. Essay 2: Introduction and Q&A
3,000 words including references (50% of final mark)
Deadline: upload by 6pm on Monday 23 October
Drawing on critical theories and scholarship, sociologically investigate a specific issue or practice of your own choice from compulsory education.
Examples could include:
a critical analysis of school uniforms;
the medical surveillance of young people in education;
an investigation of school tests as racist practice;
a discussion of gendered curriculum development as a part of patriarchal ideology;
an exploration of physical education as symbolic violence;
religious education as cultural and political indoctrination.

13. Critical Feminist Theory
Selected Bibliography:
Adams, P. (2008) ‘Positioning Behaviour: Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in the Post‐Welfare Educational Era’, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 12(2): 113–125.
Ball, S. J. (2013) Foucault, Power, and Education. Abingdon: Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rose, N. (1999) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (2nd ed.). London: Free Association Books.
Next Week:
Critical Feminist Theory