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

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poststucturalism” (May, 1995, p. 143). The first of these is the freedom “from a certain kind of bondage to the moral” (May, 1995, p. 144). May here referred to that metanarrative tradition of moral theory in which the self is normatively constituted “within the discourse so characterised” (May, 1995, p. 144). For May, moral theory is not sufficient to answer the question of how one should live. The second freedom lies in the subsequent linking—after one has stopped asking moral theory how one should live—of subjective possibility beyond “what we are free from, but what we are free for” (May, 1995, p. 144). When life is conceived aesthetically, “we see those lives as objects to be constructed rather than as cogs in a machine whose function is already given” (May, 1995, p. 144). Third, and in relationship to the first two freedoms, the ways that one’s possibilities are social (in community) as much as they are individual has implications for how one conceptualises commonsense discourses within those institutions in which people find themselves (May, 1995, pp. 144–145). By unmasking the subjectivities produced through normalising visions, this book suggests that schools have an opportunity to move beyond the bondage of 19th-century moral and disciplinary expressions of the good student to ask what freedom from these expressions may offer students, and for what they could use it. This enquiry has the potential to open a dialogue about what a reconceptualised good student could mean for the social and community landscapes in which schools are located, a step in challenging the normalising vision of the good citizen left over from the liberal philosophies of education currently informing much of the neoliberal understanding of schooling. What space remains for the philosophical, moral, and ethical visions of the good student as capable of contributing to society as the good citizen, and how could these visions change? At best, confusion arises among competing discourses of the good, discourses that force—but also allow—students to become negotiators and performers within their schools as they seek to maximise their returns from social and institutional interactions. At its worst, it may be argued, performative education values such a narrow range of student dispositions that contemporary students’ possibilities are impoverished relative to possibilities of the past and future potentials.