Education as Democracy: Reclaiming the Agency of Subjectivity and the Courage of Truth

• In Event: Reclaiming the Teaching Profession: What Are We Reclaiming?

Abstract

Objectives

Neoliberalism has deleteriously impacted education by magnifying the historic American preoccupation with the practical effects of the business-minded, the complements of capitalism and anti-intellectualism (Hofstadter, 1962; Pinar, 2006; Weber, 1930/2001). This paper contributes a counter-narrative to the discourse of neoliberal marketization by analyzing the role of subjectivity in K-12 and teacher education. The continuous process of subjective reconstruction through academic study is critical to authentic democratic encounters (Pinar, 2004) through which teachers and teacher educators embody the courage to speak and hear truth, an essential aspect of American intellectual and democratic life.

Perspective

I use Foucault’s (2011) historical analysis of parrhēsia, speaking truth, to illustrate the historic embodiment of counter-conduct to forms of institutionalized disciplinary power, particularly neoliberal capitalism, which seek to produce compliant, “self-auditing” subjects through education (Shore & Wright, 2000). Even in the face of disciplinary institutional power, spaces exist, particularly in complicated classroom conversation (Pinar, 2012) in which to embody the subjective courage of truth and reconfigure power as more just and humane (Foucault 2007).
Methods and Data Sources
I use synoptic content analysis (Jay, 1988; LaCapra, 1983), borrowed from the field of intellectual history, to analyze texts using both documentary and worklike approaches:
The documentary situates the text in terms of factual or literal dimensions….The worklike is critical and transformative for it deconstructs and reconstructs the given, in a sense repeating it but also bringing into the world something that did not exist before. (LaCapra, 1983, p. 30)
Data consist of Foucault’s seminal texts, including his lectures at the Collège de France, and Pinar’s post-Reconceptualization curriculum theory.

Results

To “reclaim” the teaching profession, Hatch (2015) urges speaking “truth to power,” but is speaking truth enough? The historic struggle over public education is best understood in the context of a broader system of disciplinary power in which speaking truth requires a commitment to embody truth in one’s life, which entails myriad risks. Education has historically functioned as one of many institutions in a general economy of power that effectuate power as disciplinary knowledges to produce “docile bodies” that are easily governable and habituated to prevailing systems of production (Foucault, 1977/1995, 2015). To contest and reconfigure institutional power and reclaim the teaching profession requires the reclamation of the “agency of subjectivity,” without which “education evaporates” (Pinar, 2012, p. 43). In the neoliberal era, self-knowledge—subjectivity—is perhaps the most important knowledge that teaching and teacher education must reclaim (Pinar, 2011). Reclaiming subjectivity in an objectifying disciplinary system predicated on partial yet totalizing institutionalized theoretical discourses can resurrect subjugated knowledges and wisdom traditions, including self-knowledge, and complicate curricular dialogues through which we can risk speaking, hearing, and embodying truth (Foucault, 2011).

Significance

At a historical moment when configurations of institutional power are solidifying against public K-12 and higher education, and the very notion of the public itself, the urgency of reclaiming the teaching profession (Hatch, 2015) should provoke us all to reclaim our subjective agency to embody truth, a crucial aspect of resuscitating American intellectual and democratic life.

Author

• Jim Burns, Florida International University