Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

and disciplining subjectivities that currently dominate much of the way that the student is envisioned within mainstream education. Through this problematisation, this study opens possibilities for the construction of student identities that underlie the concept of the good student. I believe that the good student—as that role is currently acted, enacted, and understood in schools—is a technology of the self that is narrow and rigid in its production of student subjectivities. I would like to see schools and school communities become places where freer identities are possible. Implicit in this vision is an argument that Foucault’s work optimistically suggests that there is a possibility for freer selves and a better society—a rebuttal to many of the criticisms aimed at Foucault over a number of years (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1993, pp. 206–207).

Finally, this chapter presents a preliminary examination of the good student through the lens of Foucault. In particular, I link a critique of the good student to the ontological possibility of living as freer selves within a postcapitalist world. I see this as a way of creating an art of the individual that offers new ways of dealing with social challenges and inequities that are historically constructed and institutionally deployed. Schools and schooling are crucial reference points in the ways that individuals are disciplined, but they are also significant sites of possibilities that could offer new ways of being and becoming—that could offer, in short, new arts of living.

Why Foucault?

This introduction of some of Foucault’s more significant ideas is not intended to be either exhaustive or biographical. Rather, it serves as a guide to the ways that Foucault’s work can be understood, particularly in relation to the school and the idealised good student. Locating Foucault is a necessary yet daunting task. Few thinkers have perplexed scholars as much as Foucault has, largely because he refused to name himself in a traditional sense. In an interview published in 1988, he stated that he did not “feel it necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else you were not in the beginning”