Who is the Good High School Student?
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Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

Chapter 1:  Foucault and the Good Student
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have we made him so? After twenty years have we domesticated and tamed his politics, institutionalised him, finally nailed his coffin home and categorised his work once and for all? (Peters & Besley, 2008, p. 1)

Certainly there is ample evidence that in education, Foucault has all too often been used in ways that seem contrary to the radical possibilities in his work. Peters and Besley argued that

in the field of education scholars and theorists deform him: they use him or elements of his thought; they abuse him in countless ways; they unmake him and remake him; they twist and turn him and his words; sometimes they squeeze him very thinly, at other times they squeeze him into small spaces; often they appeal to Foucault, beginning with a quote only to do something very conventional and mundane, against his original intent. (Peters & Besley, 2008, p. 3)

This notion clearly has informed my research aim of problematising the good student. My work is explores the subjectivities of school students in order to unmask those technologies that are at play in the making of the contemporary school student. In this chapter, I move through Foucault’s work chronologically and theoretically to explore the implications of the “different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subject” (Foucault, 1993, p. 209).

The following discussion focuses, too, on articulating how Foucauldian theory could (should) be used beyond the theorising of policy and the broad sweep of educational enquiry (which often, despite its claims to the contrary, seems limited to the construction of education as a set of oppressive technologies) to suggest that the productive effects of power may best be understood through local practices. In these local games of power, it is possible to reclaim the radical change suggested in Foucault’s work and to challenge at the microlevel some disciplinary practices that have come to seem normal. This reclamation requires considered attention to what is variously called the “later Foucault,” or the “ethics of Foucault” that dominated his work in the last stages of his life.