Security, Territory, Population (1977–1978)

• In Event: Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France: Implications for Research in Education

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this paper is to conduct a close reading of Foucault’s 1978 Lectures at the College de France, published as Security, Territory, Population (2004, English translation published in 2007), in relation to the contemporary role(s) of schooling.
Perspective: The perspective taken for this analysis will be built from the perspective of an educational theoretical perspective based on American Pragmatism, as articulated by Dewey.
Methods and Data Sources: The structure of the paper is built from a comparative analysis of Foucault’s lectures and Dewey’s (1916) Democracy and Education.
Conclusions and Significance
Foucault’s 1978 Lectures are the beginning of what Foucault termed his analysis of bio-power. These lectures trace how Foucault understand this focus to have developed from his early institutional analyses of hospitals, psychiatry asylum, and prisons, toward an analysis of the mechanisms of power and the problem of government. As this work begins, Foucault is clear that his identification of the Modern problematic of power was possible, starting from the eighteen century, when ‘modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.’ (p.1)
The particular interest in this set of lectures stems from the way in which Foucault used his re-framing of history to interrogate classic texts of Western political and social philosophy, in essence offering a re-interpretation of the political philosophical tradition that runs from Plato through Machiavelli to Rousseau, inter alia. These texts are precisely the same used by Dewey in his framing of education in the early part of the 20th century. Thus the first part of the paper seeks to illustrate common and disparate readings of the classic texts of English speaking educational philosophy.
The second part of this analysis turns to another shared singular focus. Beyond shared intellectual history, both Foucault and Dewey were in a position to theoretically consider what is now a concrete problem: the problem of sustaining humans as a species. As both theorists observed, this question directly leads to the question of how we understand ‘the individual.’ Here, it is possible that this textual juxtaposition allows us to find an importantly shared insight into Modern schooling as an institution. That is, Dewey’s aversion to bureaucratically structured schooling is strikingly similar to Foucault’s analysis of how the individual as a means by which multiplicity is governed.
The final step in this analysis of to ask what these shared insights might tell us about what forms of schooling, if any, could possibly meet the problem human sustainability. Roughly speaking this is a way of asking what schooling has to do with contemporary crises (in politics, economics, culture) that confront our own long-term survival.

Author

• James G. Ladwig, The University of Newcastle