Moral subjects, healthy adolescents: Analyzing the discourse of health education in Greek secondary education

Abstract

In this article, our aim is to put forward a sociological analysis of the educational policy on health education in Greece. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of self-techniques, this article highlights how moral subjects are formed within the Discourse of Health Education. Analyzing all the health education texts that the Ministry of Education addresses to pupils and teachers in secondary education, we try (i) to explore all the main statements that compose the semantic space of health education within which such terms as communicative competence, life-skills or active listening take on their meaning and delimit the ways in which teacher and pupils are to view each other and (ii) to capture the ways through which these statements not only represent the moral claims of health education but also entail a set of techniques the adolescents are called to implement in order to become health-conscious and to avoid unhealthy behaviors. Finally, we show how these self-techniques become relevant in relation to the ritual rules of the experiential education within which adolescents are called to adopt healthy lifestyles. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.