1. Tuğba Boz
Michel Foucault
Power & Knowledge
on Education

2. Outline
Power &
Power Power & Knowledge
Knowledge on
Education
«I have spoken and saved my soul» K. Marx
«It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is
to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be
both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner
that political violence has always exercised itself obscurely through them
will be unmasked so that one can fight against them.» M. Foucault

3. Power

4. POWER
SOVEREIGNITY
POWER
PURELY COERCIVE
using force to persuade Deployed by
CONCENTRATED POSSESSED people to do things which
they are unwilling to do some Agents

5. ...you can't prevent me
from believing that
these notions of human
nature, of justice, of the
realisation of the
essence of human
beings, are all notions
and concepts which
have been formed
within our civilisation,
within our type of
knowledge and our form
of philosophy, and that
as a result form part of
Foucault – Chomsky on Justice our class system...

6. Liberal/ Marxist vs. Foucaldian
Liberal/
1. Power is possessed at Marxist
different levels or strata of the
society.
2. Power is always exercised
from top to bottom.
3. Power is always repressive.

7. Foucault believes that:
1. Power is everwhere and comes from
everywhere and even in routine everyday lives.
2. Power is exercised both from bottom- up
and from top- buttom.
3. It is not only negative or in macro- level but
also it is in micro- levels and necessary and
productive, and it is even a positive force in the
society.
4. Power imposed on human activity is neither POWER
an agency nor a structure, in fact it is diffused,
embodied or enacted, discursive, and it
constitutes agents indeed.
THIS IS DISCIPLINARY POWER.

8. Techniques of Regulating Power
Normalization Classification Surveillance
‘We are in the society of teacher- judge,
the doctor- judge,
the educator- judge…
he may find himself subjecting to it his body,
his gestures, his behavior,
his aptitudes, his achievements.’
Bentham’s Panopticon

9. Disciplinary Power
As an example to this disciplinary power, in terms of power in educational settings:
• Students are segmented into precisely timed classes.
• The arrangement of many classrooms remains rigidly hierarchial: students face
forward, arrayed before an authority figure who stands at the front of the room,
and who is usually addressed formally (as in "Mr. So-and- So, may I use the
bathroom please?").
• The testing procedures used by many teachers reinforce rote styles of learning and
retention, where facts are privileged over concepts, and where kids are taught more
for the nationally standardized tests than for intellectual nourishment.

10. Foucault believes that:
1. Power is everwhere and comes from
everywhere and even in routine everyday lives.
2. Power is exercised both from bottom- up
and from top- buttom.
3. It is not only negative or in macro- level but
also it is in micro- levels and necessary and
productive, and it is even a positive force in the
society.
4. Power imposed on human activity is neither POWER
an agency nor a structure, in fact it is diffused,
embodied or enacted, discursive, and it
constitutes agents indeed.
THIS IS DISCIPLINARY POWER.

11. Power & Knowledge
According to Foucault, power is knowledge and knowledge is power.

12. Think about the doctors/ teachers etc.
These truths are the results of historical processes: scientific developments/
discourse and institutions such as schools, hospitals, the media, the political or
economical ideologies. Therefore there is no absolute truth or universal
truth (value) but critique can produce truths which are relative to the
contemporary society. It is specific and power is attached to the true
in this sense.

13. Power- Knowledge & Curriculum
Relativism/Truth and the Curriculum
 Moral Relativism
Moral systems vary across cultures, historical periods, different people within the
same culture. Even if most societies or every society shared the same moral belief,
that does not necessarily prove any moral absolutes. They might be all wrong.
 Conseptual Relativism
Thought, belief, and knowledge systems are embedded in particular social
arrangements, which cannot be changed through individual willpower, but
nevertheless do not persist over timen and are different in different cultures.
 Perceptual Relativism
Remember Whorf «we dissect nature along lines laid down by our native
language.»
 Truth Relativism
No universal absolutes embedded in logic or rationality.
Opposed to Hirst’s ideas on making distinctions between disciplines according to
their particular concepts and including them at that way.

14. POWER- KNOWLEDGE & CURRICULUM
Foucault and Education
Foucault and the Examination

15. Foucault and Education
‘Take, for example, an educational institution:
the disposal of its space, the meticulous
regulations which govern its internal life, the
different activities which are organized there,
the diverse persons who live there or meet
one another, each with his own function, his
well-defined character. The activity which
ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of
aptitudes or types of behavior is developed
there by means of a whole ensemble of
regulated communications (lessons, questions
and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs
of obedience, differentiation marks of the
"value" of each person and of the levels of
knowledge) and by the means of a whole
series of power processes (enclosure,
surveillance, reward and punishment, the
pyramidal hierarchy).’

16. • A progressive mechanism for combatting
nepotism, favouritism, arbitrariness, for contributing to a more efficient
society,
• A reliable and valid way to choosing the appropriate members of a
population for imporatant roles in the society.

17. Foucault and the Examination
«(The examination) combines the techniques of observing
hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a
normalizing 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.»

18. Any Qs?
What’s Your Message?
28th of March, 2012