Reflection 4

D. Leroux                                                                                                      Harry Reddin  A00311697

Reflection #4

Michel Foucault on Education

When you hear Michel Foucault’s name you tend to automatically catalogue him under the category of knowledge and power relations. Roger Deacon attempts break away and focus on three educational aspects with regard to Foucault’s works and separates his theatrical overview from others by focusing  on the past, present and future of schooling.   Roger Deacon is successful in developing the implications of Foucault’s work but admittedly just scrapes at the first layers of this great theorists multi-faceted perspective. Deacon is effective when he further breaks these timeframes from a negative orientated techno-political rise of education, to a positive phase of entrenchment and expansion phase. Although this theoretical overview focuses on education, in true Foucault style Deacon is drawn back into the moral framework and underlying power relations involved in these relationships making his attempt to separate education and the power relationship less forceful.

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Problemization is the term Deacon uses when describing Michel Foucault’s take on education, specifically the production through historical forms of constraint.   Deacon focuses on the trend of education from the 17^th century to the middle of the 19^th century and describes this shift from negative to positive through a series of processes centered on confinement, inclusion and moving from group to individual learning.   This assessment makes sense and could be used accurately and used two-fold again to view the similar changes made in education from mid-19^th century to present day.   Hindsight is 20/20 and often it does take society a while to learn from its mistakes and this is where the similarity lies between Deacons overview and examples of educational practices in today’s society.   Early on it was the socio-economic implications and lack of regulation that was problematic, further compounded by corporal punishment which back then was a desperate measure to combat the issues surrounding the hostile environment. This can be compared to today’s system where positive re-enforcement has evolved from the methods such as the abusive forms of corporal punishment, that obviously do not sit well with Foucault. The words confinement, control and constraint are littered throughout Roger Deacon’s review of Foucault and again this underlying power theme cannot be ignored.

The concept of School as a moral orthopedic is discussed as the second theme of this review and is given responsibility to regulate and develop the learning process transforming the aforementioned negative aspects of education into positive outcomes.   With this new framework Foucault discusses a new judicial power within the school, often comparing students to inmates and again describes the transfer of knowledge as a process which seeks to instill discipline. Within the envelope of this framework is also the contentious moral responsibility of teachers to their students but Deacon also focused on the disturbing fact that reciprocal surveillance must also be monitored, a controversial topic that Foucault takes head on,  like a bull in a china shop.   This surveillance is required to protect children from adult sexuality and refers to the positive changes made to the educational systems of the past that now separate students and segregate them based on age and gender, as discussed in class.

The third theme focuses on the institutions regulated concerted systems and how the primary concern is communication over capacity and power. Foucault maintains that to be effective an institution must avoid the effects of dominating its students whilst maintaining efficiency through surveillance. This concept was again thoroughly discussed and a poll was taken where students were asked if they felt they were negatively affected by surveillance techniques of Saint Mary’s University. The responses varied to where some students felt the eyes of the institution weighing heavily on them whereas others like me felt the opposite with a sense of freedom where surveillance was negligible. Reflecting on my own experience as a member of the military, I have a difficult time in describing Saint Mary’s University as a restrictive atmosphere. Foucault also examined teaching styles comparing and contrasting the lecture-seminar approaches, stating the seminar method is effective in neutralizing the unequal power relationship making it a more reciprocal arrangement. This critique is consistent with Paulo Freire’s observations and his metaphor of the banking method approach to describe the lecture style of teaching, which surprising to me remains the preferred method of instruction to many students of this class.

In conclusion, Roger Deacon’s preliminary theatrical overview of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre is interesting in that it exploits the education implications of his work past, present and future but falls short in truly separating education and power relations, with a tendency to focus on the latter. Maybe this shortfall is actually a lesson in itself, showing us it is virtually impossible to truly discuss one without the other.  Deacon critiques this overview by labeling it as an initial finding and recognizes more research is needed to address more concrete future applications of Foucault’s work on Education.