The complexity of this interaction of forms of power is suggested by the fact that the very resistance of the youths Willis studies serves to fit them into the niches that the disciplinary society has prepared for the children of the working class. The paradox is that their very resistance to the sovereign power wielded by their teachers places them (and their teachers) ever more firmly in the grip of the disciplinary power that neither students nor teachers stop to perceive, as busy as they are fulfilling their roles within the paradigms of sovereignty. Resisting (and exercising) the sovereignty that belongs to the teacher blinds all even more surely to the disciplinary power that operates on all concerned. It is the sleight of hand by which disciplinary power diverts attention from its exercise.
There are, we should note, serious deficiencies in Foucault?s notion that everything reduces to power. His work at times becomes almost theological in tone; his faith that everything is reducible, finally, to power obscures the ordinary and valuable distinction between power and authority;20 his view that discipline is imposed on us as an effect of power makes us blind to Dewey?s sense of discipline as a relationship between us and the world as we pursue our aims;21 and there seems no space for us to consider Noddings?s interesting notions about having a worthwhile ethical ideal to which we aspire.22 Nonetheless, a Foucauldian analysis does serve to point to the extent to which we underestimate the complexity of “the discipline problem” in schools, and the inadequacy of the pre-packaged programs sold to practitioners as remedies.
For a response to this essay, see McDonough.
Bibliography
1 Stanley M. Elam, Lowell C. Rose, and Alec M. Gallup, “The 24th Annual Gallup. Phi Delta Kappa Poll of the Public?s Attitude Toward the Public Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan 74 (September 1992): 41-53.
2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 209.
3 This formulation ? “power relationships” ? may be a redundancy; Foucault?s point is that all relationship are power relationships. Power exists and is manifested (or comes into being) in all relationships.
4 When Foucault talks about “forms” of power, he is referring to different modes of operation.
5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 209.
6 John O?Neill, “The Disciplinary Society: From Weber to Foucault,” The British Journal of Sociology 37 (1986): 42-60.
7 Davis Jones, “The Genealogy of the Urban Schoolteacher,” in Foucault and Education: Discipline and Knowledge, ed. Steven J. Ball (New York: Routledge, 1990), 57-77.
8 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184-92.
9 The other paradigmatic institutions include hospitals, asylums, and, most clearly, prisons.
10 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 164.
11 Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1987), 213.
12 Linda M. McNeil, Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
13 This is clearly the interpretation that drives one whole family of educational reform initiatives, most notably those of the Holmes Group.
14 McNeil, Contradictions of Control, 9, xxi.
15 That is clearly the assumption that underlies the calls for national testing. Compare this to Foucault?s description of disciplinary power?s action through surveillance and examination.
16 McNeil, Contradictions of Control, xxi.
17 Thomas F. Green, Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1980). One of Green?s points is that education policy tends to be set in such a way that is works to avoid failure, not attain excellence.
18 McNeil, Contradictions of Control, xx.
19 Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
20 See especially Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972-1977, trans. Kate Sopor (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 90-91.
21 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: The Free Press, 1966).
22 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkely, California: University of California Press, 1984).
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