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which are deployed from a variety of perspectives and vantage points. The exact impact is impossible to measure, but what is clear is that students must constitute themselves within this swirling set of discourses. This creative act is, I believe, part of the crisis of the subject. Within a school, how is the self taught to “know” and relate to its various elements? How does this self-knowledge help frame an understanding of being and becoming? I see the normalising vision of the good student as central to constructing technologies of the self that measure the value of the self and that teach students to locate themselves within these complex social worlds. I argue that this is one of the greatest challenges for education in the 21st century: to move conceptions of the student from the passive, disciplined self to a more dynamic and freer self within the terrains of mass, compulsory schooling. Meeting this challenge requires first problematising the normalising vision of the good student in order to open up new and freer possibilities of the self as a particular kind of ethical subject.
The crisis of the subject goes deeper than the formation of the individual. I see the world as quickly approaching a number of difficult social, economic, and environmental impasses. Issues such as overpopulation, world poverty, starvation, and access to fresh water become increasingly urgent when married with environmental concerns, such as climate change and diminishing fossil fuels. These issues, amongst many others, haunt the landscape in which the individual is increasingly exposed to ethical dilemmas that they are ill equipped to resolve. Schools have often been places where what is valued is docile behaviour and attitudes and vocational goals that do not equip the individual to deal in problem solving and ethical action (Symes & Preston, 1997, p. 222). In short, schools are places where young people learn about the types of authority and appropriate behaviours and attitudes more often than they are equipped with skills to meet the requirements of a changing world.
What is needed is a problematisation of those things society takes for granted in education, of those “commonsense” truths that so often form the bedrock of the enclosed terrain of education, an examination of educational institutions in order to unmask the ways in which the student is