The Scientific Discourse of Education: Predetermining the Lives of others — Foucault, Education, and Children

Abstract

A discourse of education has emerged that legitimizes the belief that science has revealed what younger human beings are like, what we can expect from them at various ages, and how we should differentiate our treatment of them in educational settings. Recent poststructuralist, critical, and postmodern work has called to question the notion of predetermined, universal childhoods that require particular forms of educational experience determined by scientific discovery and by human beings who are older. The purpose of this article is to further problematize the discourse of education that has justified the construction of younger human beings as the ‘other’ and legitimizes the continued regulation of their lives through the institution of education. This particular problematization is based on and limited by the work of Foucault and addressed from two positions: (1) rules that govern the discourse of education; and (2) disciplinary technologies that produce docile bodies as objects that yield to the discourse.