Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

This argument is presented almost as a corrective for that educational research which seems to see education solely as practices of oppressive power without understanding or acknowledging the ways that the self is able to move within these matrices of power.

In particular, I am interested in exploring how Foucault’s work could usefully contribute to an exploration of freer subjectivities. Therefore I focus on the notion of the good student as an example of how these apparatuses are deployed.

Theorising the good student requires this work to engage the continuing problems of resistance and action in a Foucauldian theoretical framework. How can one understand freedom if resistance to power is necessary for operation of the normalising hierarchy of power? In other words, how can student choices be framed when students think or act differently? Is a rebellious student any freer than a docile body? I also want to point out some gaps, silences, and contradictions in Foucauldian theory. In response to these, I suggest that one does not want to be a disciple of Foucault; rather, one needs to engage in pushing his work so that his powerful critique of society and its institutions is maintained and revitalised. It is this that Peters and Besley suggested is the answer to the questions about studying Foucault. One should continue to explore Foucault in “the context of his uses” because this reframing continues to provide reinvigoration (Peters & Besley, 2008, p. 1). I suggest, furthermore, that one must engage Foucault agonistically, connect him with others who have been concerned with subjectivities, and reconcile him with those theorists who have moved through and pushed past the oversimplification of the apparatus of power in late modern society and, particularly, its institutions.

Drawing on the later Foucault leads one to consider the good student in light of an ethics of subjectivity and to move beyond his earlier analytics of power, in which the disciplined subject was largely constituted through external discourses and relations of power. The ethical Foucault posited that a freer self as an aesthetic practice within disciplining power suggested an ethics of self-care. It is this ethics that I see as informing my attempt to problematise the good student, to move beyond the disciplined