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Problematising the good student requires the examination of these competing discourses and of the ways that they encourage students to inhabit specific subjectivities that accord different forms of status and privilege within the institution and in life after school.
A Note on the Good Student
The good student has a long genealogy in Western schooling. It would not be too much to say that the history of the philosophy of education is partly the history of truth claims concerning how the student is idealised within individual philosophies. For example, Aristotle privileged training in virtue; Rousseau idealised the good as a natural state free from the corrupting influence of urban life; Locke argued for the principled student who adhered to the adage a sound mind in a sound body. The idea of the good student is not a new preoccupation in education; however, this book should not be read as a history of the good student and does not purport to idealise what the good student should be. Rather than idealising the theory of the good student, I have asked students what they think a good student is and in what ways they consider themselves good students. This approach gives this work a sense of how the vision of the good student is experienced and reveals the play of power in contemporary education.
It is through discourses and practices that students are taught to comport themselves in appropriate ways as they move from childhood to adulthood, from the role of student to that of citizen. The central premise of this study is that notions of the good student are heavily imbued with binary thinking, and that young people know themselves through complex hierarchies that normalise what a student could possibly be. These binaries are used as a technology to govern the student and are deployed in ways that seek to make students complicit in their own governance. This premise extends to some secondary thoughts. First, the binary logic that grounds the institutional deployment of the good student means that it becomes a tool for normalisation within the enclosed spaces of mass compulsory schooling. Combined with