Pedagogy as a Political Science: Curriculum as a Site of Power, Knowledge, Ethics, and Aesthetics

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Educational Change: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Educational Reforms Across and Beyond National Boundaries

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger study that traces the emergence of the “biopolitical” interpretation of the social and the subject in Turkey in the first three decades of the Turkish Republic (1920s to 1950s). The larger project draws on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, understood here as a cultural system of reasoning (Popkewitz) in ordering the modern society and inventing modern subjects. In Foucault, biopolitics emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century when modern States acquired a new pastoral function to care for their population, adopting the right to intervene in the life of the population, aiming to improve it by eliminating all those accidents, chances, random elements, deficiencies, and other threats (Foucault, 2003).
In this chapter, I trace the biopolitical State in Turkey in certain pedagogical projects carried out in the designated period. I begin with describing a Seyyar Terbiye Sergisi (a travelling education exhibition) that was initiated in 1933 as part of the celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the Republic. The exhibition was installed in a train with compartments of education, and health, which was meant to travel to the rural areas of Turkey to inform the people of the new developments in education and health. The coordinator of the exhibition was a prominent professor of pedagogy, İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, who was also the forefather of the idea of Köy Enstitüleri (Village Institutes) in Turkey.
The exhibition is important in two senses: a) it allows me to trace how biological and medical discourses (psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and medicine) are converted into and carried by pedagogical projects; b) how the State comes to see pedagogically as a social project of fabricating modern citizens, that is, how it adopts pedagogical skills and approaches as principles ordering the social body. First, the analysis helps to claim that pedagogical question was bound up with the political and social problems of the day. That is pedagogy was always already political. Second, analysis of such “exhibitory” practices helps to visualize (literally though exhibitions and metaphorically through the idea of travelling) the State as a function of its biopolitical practices, and make visible these practices in educational vocabulary and the national curriculum. I hope to make visible a (contingent) matrix constituted of power, knowledge and ethics (scientists, practitioners, and political actors), a matrix that was/is constitutive of modern subjectivities in Turkey.
I use a wide range of historical sources to construct the narrative including visual materials related to the exhibition, brochures and publications of the Pedagogy Institute of Istanbul University, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, the Ministry of Education, and journals and newspapers.

Author

• Yasin Tunc, University of Wisconsin - Madison