Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

governing and producing citizens has led to the creation of institutions that Western society accepts as appropriate and commonsense—in short, as “normal.” One of these institutions is the school. Schools are places where a multitude of functions and relationships continually shape and reshape the attitudes and experiences of those who become the citizenry that the state desires. However, schools and the processes that underpin schooling are anything but normal. I advocate thinking about schools and schooling as places where power is manifestly at work in a multitude of ways to create certain kinds of subjectivities deemed suitable for that governable citizenry. My aim is to better understand some of the processes that occur in schools and to examine ways these processes that lead to certain kinds of subjectification could be opened up to create new possibilities. In particular, I am interested in those normalising discourses of the good student.

I undertake a detailed analysis of Foucault because his theories on power, subjectification, and care of the self are central to my understanding of the possibilities of the good student deployed in schools. I also maintain that the body of Foucault’s work constitutes his ethics of the effects of power on the individual and on the potential strategies that the individual could utilise to act in freer ways within this nexus of power relations. In my mind, Foucault’s work on power and subjectivities needs to be understood through the admonition to care for the self.This chapter is not simply about explaining Foucault’s work; many other writers and theorists have already done this. Rather, I suggest that a growing hegemonic use of Foucault’s work increasingly avoids the radical, practical implications of his theories in favour of seeing him as a “negative theorist,” or one who critiques much but proposes little. This shift can be seen in the changing treatment of Foucault from 1990, when Stephen J. Ball “introduced Foucault” because his work had made little impact on education, to 2008, when Peters and Besley asked,