Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

made subject. The idea of the good student is heavily imbued with binary notions, such as success and failure. There is a performative aspect to the good student: Being seen to do the right thing is more important than behaving in an ethical way. There is a productive aspect: The good student is produced and shaped by particular discourses, macro in deployment but micro in flavour. That is, from school to school, the productive visions of the good student vary. For example, some of these visions may have a basis in class; others may have a basis in gender. Of importance is that schools are historically contingent as normative places that evaluate and judge and that exist to produce particular types of people perceived to be best suited to meet the needs of a late-capitalist economy. Hunter maintained that schools are ethical places “responsible for the moral and social training of the population,” that schools are about governance and production (Hunter, 1994, p. xxii).

The change that must occur is twofold. First, schools need to become places where the self is valued differently, where what is taught is more about ethics and the self rather than docility and obedience. Second, schools need to be places that help students learn new ways of moving through the enclosed landscapes, the “new weapons” that Deleuze saw as the major challenge (Deleuze, 1992). Schools could become freer places where the normative and constraining discourses give way to an ethics that is more concerned with the care of the self and, through this care, with the care of others that both offer greater possibility for freer thought and action. Changing the nature of schools thus makes the crisis of the subject a central concern of the scope of education, potentially opening up new and freer ways of being and becoming.

The findings of this study show a number of facets to the role of the good student in secondary schools. First, the data highlight multiple competing and contradictory expectations of the good student that can depend on perspective and on social expectations. These competing discourses require the student to become a negotiator, a producer of the self in the complex play of power relations in the school. Students are encouraged to know themselves as certain types of people and then to govern themselves within the framework of this knowing. One