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Writing with regard to the change in sexual behaviour from ancient to early Christian times, Foucault argued:
The crisis of the subject leads to ontological questions about being and the self, offering new ways of thinking about this crisis. Schools are key societal institutions in which this crisis is produced and maintained not only through the normalising vision of the good student but also through other means. However, and somewhat paradoxically, it is in this crisis of the subject that possibilities for freer action for young people exist. This work addresses schools and schooling because these are increasingly common experiences, albeit in contingent and contextual ways, for the majority of people in the Western world. Schools and schooling largely appear to make sense because members of modern society believe they understand what happens and what should happen in schools. The good student is framed within these aspects of cultural understanding. However, this commonsense attitude is based on a hegemonic understanding of the good, rather than on the good student as a contingent multiplicity that is produced by an infinite set of discourses and experiences. An example of this is the rhetoric of autonomous choice at the centre of liberal and neoliberal conceptions of the learner set against those practices that make freer choice implausible, if not impossible. Within the multiplicity, the good student is a complex and dynamic negotiation between competing and often contradictory truths that is highly significant in how young people come to know themselves as certain types.
Schools are places where students are immersed over a long period in a world of complex social rules and regulation, with corresponding expectations regarding behaviour, morality, and actions. This intricate world is clouded by various academic and vocational discourses, all of