Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

the technologies of surveillance and measurement found in schools, this normalisation influences how students relate to and think about the self as they move through school. Such normalisation often extends to creating a docile subject of a hierarchy, one who acts in fairly rigid and limiting ways (Gore, 1997). Second, what room, if any, is there for students to act in freer ways within these normalising frames? The problematics of freer action for students in schools is a complex yet compelling philosophical arena that could offer radical possibilities for the shape and delivery of education in the 21st century. Lastly, by questioning the normalising vision of the good student in select schools, one gains some small sense of how movement is possible within enclosed terrains and one begins to disentangle how, as Deleuze suggested, society may move beyond fear or hope through the discovery of “new weapons” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 2).

I argue that schools need to be places where freer possibilities exist for students. I see this as an imperative in a world looking to new ways of thinking as significant social, economic, and environmental challenges loom in the 21st century. The good student is one of the “technologies” deployed in the school that teach young people to govern themselves in heavily regulated and normalising ways in order to fulfil narrowing possibilities. When this self-governance extends to life after school, the creation of a disciplined population may not be the best means of dealing with the complex realities of the future as the world grapples with issues of knowledge, sustainability, and equality. This work asks different ontological questions about the good student in order to begin the process of problematising commonsense notions within schools—and ultimately in order to reevaluate what education should be and become. This book is about the “crisis of the subject” as it occurs in contemporary Western society and its link to the crisis of education that has become part of the milieu of late-capitalist times. This crisis of education has its heart at the forms and expression of power through which individuals are governed and are taught to govern themselves, often in diverging and contradictory ways.