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The history of the present:

towards a contemporaryphenomenology of the

schoolNick Peim

Available online: 10 Nov 2010

To cite this article: Nick Peim (2001): The history of the present: towards a

contemporary phenomenology of the school, History of Education, 30:2, 177-190

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HISTORY OF EDUCATION, 2001, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 177190

The history of the present: towards a contemporary

phenomenology of the school

Nick Peim

School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, BirminghamB15 2TT, UK.

e-mail: [email protected]

Introduction: towards a theory of seeing

Phenomenology is that branch of philosophy that deals with the perception of

phenomena. The contemporary era might arguably be characterized as embracing

an anti-essentialist phenomenology. We know now that things are at least partly

what they are because of what we call them, what we do with them, with how we

distinguish them from other `things: in other words, how we `see them. We know

also that weas `human subjectscannot be written out of the identity of the

things that we see. How we are positioned, what perspective we take on things,where we `come fromall these factors of subject identity are involved in determin-

ing the nature of the things in the world that we inhabit. What is more, these power-

ful variables will actually impinge on our sense of what it is that we see. In this sense

the radical distinction between subject and object cannot be sustained. The great

divide in western metaphysics between being and consciousnessthe foundation of

so much in our culturecan no longer be sustained.1 Clearly, this has powerful

implications for knowledge.

This paper seeks to raise some questions about our sense of the identity of

thingshow we `see themand the implications of a particular way of seeing the

school in the eld of education history. This article gathers together some notes

towards an account for the specic formation of the contemporary school as a social

technology. It draws on a number of sources and perspectives, including a post-

structuralist phenomenology and a partly Foucauldian account of the transition

from pre-state education to state education in the nineteenth century. Some of the

perspectives provide fresh possibilities for the meaning of the sources. This paper

seeks to oer a renewed interest in what David Hamilton has called the `theory of

schooling,2

though with a dierent emphasis seeks to present a case for establishinga `theory of the schoolwhere the school is an object of phenomenological enquiry.

What is it? How does it work? What is its historyor genealogy? How is this history

inscribed in its characteristic form and practices? What are the implications for

educational practices and interventions in the revised account of the school that

will emerge from this process?

History of Education ISSN 0046760X print/ISSN 14645130 online # 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080 /0046760001001245 4

1 D. Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London, 2000).

2 D. Hamilton, Towards a Theory of Schooling (London, 1989).

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While claiming a deep continuity between the early elementary board school and

the contemporary primary and secondary school, this paper is an attempt to refresh

the theory of the school. It will seek to redene its genealogy, to propose a particular

historical perspective with a view to opening up a sense of `the need to grasp the

present as history:

3

that is a sense both of history in the present and of the present asa mode of history. The quarry is an account capable of dening the constituent

elements of the contemporary school; and how these combine to create particular

social eects to dene the relations between the school, its populations and the

shifting social functions of the school as a governmental instrument for person-

formation. This in turn gives rise to questions about liberationist aspirations of

much liberal critique that regards the school as the failed instrument of social

equality, full personal development or democracy. There is a necessary and necess-

arily irreducible doubleness in this vision, one that seeks to account for the enduring

social technology of the modern (post-1870) school along with the shifting relationsbetween the school, populations, cultural practices, professional identities and

policy.4 It is in the school as an instrument of person-formatio n that the deep

continuities lie; in the school as a shifting locus of policyvia the curriculum for

instancethat the mobilities are most evident. Interestingly, this position limits the

possibilities for rhetorics of transformatio n while also providing a `syntax and

`semantics for intervention. The propositions here are predicated on the idea

that the school remains at the centre of the contemporary state in spite of various

rhetorics of deschooling and prognostications of school-less techno-futures.5

The genealogy of the school

Although schools may have existed for countless centuries, the theory of the school

that I am proposing is concerned with the specic form of school as we know itthe

contemporary state school that can trace a direct genealogy to the elementary school

of the late nineteenth century. For the purposes of this theory the school comes into

being in 1870although it is vital not to represent this moment as a kind of educa-

tional `big bang. Clearly, the general institution that emerges in the form of the

state-funded elementary school was developed from and in reaction to some of theexisting models, ideas and practices and comprised the bits and pieces of ready-to-

hand human technologies.6 It must be equally obvious that this process did not

happen all at once. The school did not emerge fully formed out of the 1870

Education Act. The process of its denition seems to have been concerned with

the developing conception of a number of key elements. Of particular signicance

was the `architectural organization of the social spaces of the schoolalong with the

clarication of their symbolic social functioning. The classroom, the playground and

the school hall all dene specic and related social functions central to a newlydeveloped and still powerful human technology. This new formation also included

178 N. Peim

3 F. Jameson, `The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodern Debate, in TheIdeologies of Theory, Essays, 19711986, Vol. 2: The Syntax of History (London, 1988). Quoted inS. Homer, `Frederic Jameson and the Limits of Postmodern Theory, http://vest.theorysc.gu.se/vest_mails/0742.html, 1.

4 For Ivic the school itself is the `message in the McLuhan sense. See H. Daniels (ed.), An Introduction toVygotsky (London, 1996), 22.

5 I. Illich, Deschooling Society (Harmondsworth, 1973) and David Hartleys more recent and pertinent

Reschooling Society (London, 1997).6 I. Hunter, Rethinking the School (Sydney, 1994).

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the denition of the gure of the teacher, the expansion of the curriculum. In total,

the `new school represents an array of spaces, techniques and occasions for the

transformatio n of populations. There seems to have been a particularly intense

period of development when the various pressures towards universal state education

induced the development that produced a model which might be identied as generalif not universal.7

According to the logic of pastoral discipline the school becomes the condition for

contemporary liberal Western social formations.8 Discipline, through `the machinery

of cultural regulation, is entwined with a regime of carethe pastoralto enable a

certain, specic form of `freedom.

Numerous accounts exist of the emergence of the form of the state elementary

school in the nineteenth century.9 In these accounts the elementary school emerges

from the bits and pieces of ready-to-hand practices that come to be reorganized intoa new form of institution. The school as we know it, according to these accounts, has

a relatively `shallow historical life. It is clearly distinguished from its more socially

elevated contemporariessuch as Lancing College or Christchurch Collegewhich

can be seen from their architectural ground plans, components and building styles to

be very dierent kinds of institutions with very dierent kinds of social function.

The history of the present 179

Figure 1. Varna Street School, Manchester (1904).

7 Hunter, op. cit., Hamilton, op. cit. and D. Jones, `The genealogy of the urban schoolteacher, inFoucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, edited by S. Ball (London, 1990), 5777.

8 Hunter, op. cit.9 D. Wardle, English Popular Education, 17801970 (Cambridge, 1970).

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Architecturally and stylistically they enjoy a correspondence with the more grandiose

aspirations of Oxbridge colleges and the higher spiritual orientations of their grand

chapels. The new elementary schools, on the other handas exemplied in Varna

Street School (Manchester, 1900)have a strong resemblance to the nineteenth-

century factory buildings that dominated the post-industrial revolution skylines ofurban industrial centres.10 Indeed, the new elementary schools were conceived of and

developed as responses to urbanization and industrialization, as responses to the

problems of population management.11 But they were more than factories for the

industrial production of subjects; they became complex institutions for the govern-

ance and transformation of populations. In another sense they represented a new

form of aspiration for mass urban populations in that sense architecturally presented

a sociocultural symbolism in their often (early) grand designs (up to c. 1900) and

were structured and embellished accordingly.12 The school in this new sense took up

its being at the centre of the newly ordered industrial urban landscapes that are

represented in stark metaphorical form in the model town of Titus Salts Saltaire. 13

180 N. Peim

Figure 2. Saltaire.

10 R. Lowe and M. Seaborne, The English School: Its Architecture and Organization, vol. 2 (London,1977).

11 I. Hunter, Culture and Government (London, 1988).

12 See J. Donald, Sentimental Education (London, 1992) and Lowe and Seaborne, op. cit.13 Lowe and Seaborne, op. cit.

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In `Beacons of the Future, James Donald traces the development of the elemen-

tary school from its precursor, the Lancasterian school or monitorial school.14 These

`proto schools are represented as being limited instruments on two main counts. In

the rst place, their potential social function is limited by virtue of their monolithic

architecture and arrangements of space. Conceived of as designed to manage thelearning of large numbers via a rank-and-le ordering of all its pupils in a single

space, the Lancasterian/monitorial school promoted a monolithic version of learning

via repetition. The success of this model was evident in its capacity to induce the

increasingly required qualities of literacy in large numbers. It proved an ecient

method for instructionand in its monitorial form utilized the learning of its pupils

as monitors in a kind of chain reaction of instruction. It was the proud boast of these

schools that they could eect learning for large numbers of pupils with the presence

of a single instructor. This was partly achieved by the use of `monitorsthe second

limiting feature of the monitorial school. Monitors were newly taught pupils who,once accomplished in the topic for instruction, could instruct their fellowsa kind of

unpretentious peer-tutoring. The monitorial, Lancasterian school, however, lacked

the components of the elementary school that were being developed at the time, and

that were to be combined into a new structure that would be the basis for the

development of an entirely new kind of human technology.

This new kind of human technology has been variously describedperhaps most

famously by Foucaultas bio-power.15 The point of bio-power is that it represents a

shift in the very nature of government and in the very nature of power. Bio-power

works through the dual, but necessarily combined, forces of pastoral-disciplineand

its end point is the production of self-disciplining, self-regulating citizenry overlaid

with an array of attributes. The pastoral element is perhaps best symbolized in the

extensive systems of care for the health and physical well-being of children through

the institution of the school conceived of a site for (social) transformation of the

population.16

The elementary school depended for its transformational function on the coming

together of a number of critical components. First was the characteristic arrange-

ment of space. The classic form of the elementary school is constituted of the follow-ing key spaces:

* the cellular classroom;* the communal hall;* the playground.

The cellular classroom represents a dierent space altogether from the open school-

room of the Lancasterian school. This general `invention is the necessary spatial

accompaniment of the emergence of the gure of the teacher, the bearer of the ethicaltechnology characterized as pastoral discipline. The discursive roots of this emerg-

ence are generally traced to David Stows account of the prototype modern school in

south Glasgow, the Glasgow normal school and the infants school. In relation to

this new modelling of the institutional apparatus of care, Stow begins to dene the

gure of the teacher as the pastoral gure who shares something of the character of


14 Donald, op. cit.15 M. Foucault, Technologies of the Self (London, 1988).

16 See especially P. Horn, The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild (Gloucester, 1989) and J. S. Hurt,Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes (London, 1979).

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the lives of the children he (sic) is to teach.17 The gure of the teacherlocated in the

space of the classroomrepresents the emergence of the technique of pastoral sur-

veillance that forms the core of the central social function of the schoolthe trans-

formation of subjects into a self-regulating citizenry. The classroom is the location

for the development of `simultaneous instruction that becomesafter several muta-

tionsthe system of organizing the school population into regulated segments that

can be treated to the normative processes of examination and training that charac-

terize the social function of the school.The classroom also promotes relations of proximity (a loaded metaphor). It is

the necessary condition of the `shepherdock game through which the gure of the

teacher can transform the unregulated human material of the urban populations into

the trained and self-disciplined citizen of modernity. In this sense the classroom is

both the material and institutional space for this relation and a metaphor of it. While

this classroom emerges as the necessary technology of the new form of state elemen-

tary school, it signies the opening up of a new kind of professional gure and

functionthe gure of the teacher developed theoretically and practically by

James Kay-Shuttleworth.18 In the cellular classroom the teacher could encounter

`his pupils in the guise of a disciplinary pastoral technician committed to the trans-

formation of this segment of the populace in a regime of pastoral surveillance.

Simultaneous instruction contributes to this technology by dividing the school popu-

lation into regularized units according to age and by also enabling the technique of

interrogation and response that is the main method for the training of the self. 19

182 N. Peim

Figure 3. Huntsmans Gardens Board School, Sheeld (1882).

17 D. Jones, `The genealogy of the urban schoolteacher, in S. Ball (ed.), op. cit., 5777.18 Donald, op. cit., 3045.

19 Donald, op. cit. and Hamilton, op. cit. for accounts of simultaneous instruction and see N. Rose,Governing the Soul for a powerful account of the post-panopticonic condition.

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If the cellular classroom embodies the functions `simultaneous instruction and

pastoral surveillance, it also represents the idea of normative development. The

classroom is the location of the relations between the new professional teacher gure

and the newly constructed segmentation of the population by age. This school

population thus formed can be subjected to processes of normative developmentand carefrom statistical measurements of height, to the staged tested curriculum

and the `nit nurse. The school hall being the site for general assemblies can be seen

as the place where the idea of community can be expressed and enacted. Religious

assemblies have been commonplace features of the modern school though they have

also been supplanted in recent times by secular moral/ethical assemblies on conduct

and values. The assembly hall is the place for the gathering of the population, for its

daily routinized identication as a population subject to the shared rehearsal of

values through exemplary moral tales, borrowing its style from religious practices

of the sermon and concerned with the management of order in the institution and the

inculcation of moral principles. In its most recent incarnation the assembly hall is

more likely to proer secular moral guidance than religious and is likely to present

moral dilemmas as occasions for the development of moral sensibility and the

problematization of the self in relation to the ethical as a technique for reinforcing

the development of ethical substance.20

The general purpose of the elementary school is also represented in the idea of

the playground. According to Ian Hunters account, the school could only function

as a moral training ground with the dual technology of the gallery (the form in whichthe classroom is originally conceptualized, allowing eye contact between the teacher

and the students) and the playground`the carefully crafted milieu of the

playground.21 Both David Stow and Samuel Wilderspin had advocated the signi-

cance of the playground in their accounts of their dierently pioneering schools. For

Wilderspin the playground constitutes an area dedicated to the cultivation of self-

government. In the playground working-class children`rather lthy if not legis-

lated forlearn to manage their own conduct in the company of their `fellows who

are learning to operate under similar principles of self-restraint.

22

Kay-Shuttleworthdraws on David Stows Glasgow Normal Seminary to account for the dual function

of the playground in allowing for free exerciserecreationbut also, through the

unobtrusive presence of the gure of the sympathetic teacher, to enable the devel-

opment of `propriety of demeanour.23 In addition to the classroom and the play-

ground the other main feature of the moral architecture of the school is the hall.

Whether conceptualized specically in terms of space, or, as more recently, as the

moral community of the school, the hall has classically enjoyed the functions of

moral exhortation , moral homily, inculcation and persuasive dissemination of

values. This is evident in practices that might be associated with bygone times ofreligious hegemonysuch as school hymn singing and bible readings that were part

and parcel of the running of the primary school until well into the 1960sand more

contemporarily hegemonic practices of ethical promotion, such as anti-racist exhor-


20 See for example J. M. Hull, School Worship: An Obituary (London, 1975), School Worship (EastHarling: National Society (Church of England) for Promoting Religious Education, 1989) and KentCounty Council Collective Worship.

21 Hunter (1994), op. cit., 725.

22 Ibid., 73.23 Ibid., 75.

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tations and lessons in self-improvement through work. In the space of the hall, or

through the shifted practices of `collective worship, or the promotion of community

values, the school discharges its ethical responsibilities and conrms its ethical social

function in the spiritual training of subjects/citizens. The detailed regulations of the

1988 Education Reform Act conrm this sense of the signicance of communityabove and beyond the specics of religious aliation. The essential form of the

`ritual of schooling is retained but in transposed form.24

The `deconstruction of classic school architecture of classroom, hall and play-

ground can be seen in primary school designs for open plan schools that proliferated

in the 1960s. In this new architecture of the school:

. . . what in earlier designs would have been called the `classrooms have been divided up intosmaller areas and arranged to form an open courtyard of irregular shape and easy of accessfrom the covered teaching areas.25

The open plan school is designed to realize the dream of the nineteenth-century state

elementary school. Shifted through time, overlaid with policy and its historical resi-

dues, nevertheless the open plan primary school accords perfectly with the principle

of the panopticon, with the socioethical aim of the production of the self-regulating

subject. Its design is intended to reect the renement of this human technology. It

goes one stage further perhaps with its breakdown of the dierence between spaces

of spaces of play and spaces of work into one single but intricately divided space

where the child orients itself in respect to its own capacity for self-motivation, self-

direction, self-instruction and general self-management.The end point, as it were, of this vision of the school can be seen in the modern

liberal comprehensive school, perhaps the most illustrative example of which in the

UK is Countesthorpe College. Countesthorpe was built in 1970 as part of the reali-

184 N. Peim

Figure 4. Countesthorpe College, Leicestershire, 1970.

24 For a detailed account of the symbolic signicance of ritual in schooling as an instrument of controland as a site for resistance, see B. Eggermont, `Choreography of schooling as a site of struggle, paper

presented at the ECER conference, Lahti, 2225 September 1999.25 M. Seaborne, Primary School Design (London, 1971), 68.

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zation of the `Leicestershire plan and was conceived of as `the jewel in the crown of

Stuart Masons avant-garde attempt to restructure schooling within Leicestershire to

meet the vision of the comprehensive school ideal.26 Leicestershire already had a

tradition of open-plan liberal primary schooling and was working towards the con-

struction of a cluster of `new liberal comprehensives. Here, in the very architectureof Countesthorpe College, we can trace the unlikely meeting of Andrew Fairbairn

(Stuart Masons like-minded successor in Leicestershire), the modern liberal educa-

tor-bureaucrat, with Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, his not too distant liberal bureau-

cratic ancestor.27

The governmental function of the school

Again, it is in Ian Hunters account that the synthesis of the school as an assemblage

of ad hoc techniques (genealogy) arising in dierent `departments of existence

becomes integrated into the special `purpose-built formative milieu that is the mod-ern school`the instrument and the eect of a bureaucratically organized pastoral

governance of the population.28 The `remarkable thing about this `apparatus is its

capacity to operate in dierent ethical and political registers at the same time, `to

satisfy the demands of conscience and the objectives of government.29 Hunters

version of the emergence of the `modern school draws heavily on Foucault for its

account of the specic social technology it deploys. Hunters description denes the

limits and determines the structure of the modern school. It is deeply indebted to

Foucaults account of the transformation of modern nation-states from sovereignpower to the notion of the pervasive decentred state that is inescapable in its exertion

of power.

The most frequently deployed metaphor for the description of the form of bio-

power represented by the post-1870 school is the panopticon, used by Foucault in

Discipline and Punish to demonstrate the nature of modern, capillary power. In the

image of the panopticon, surveillance is translated into self-surveillance. The pris-

oner in the cell is watched over from a central position but comes to adopt a penitent

position of self-correction, internalizing the mechanism of surveillance with the ulti-

mate aim of becoming the self-correcting, self-managing citizen. It is in the gure ofthe panopticon that the transition from the dominance of visible, sovereign power to

the supervention of invisible capillary power is illustrated. In this account, govern-

ment is transformed from something that is central, observable and accessible to

something which reaches into areas of existence where previously it had been incap-

able of intruding. On this view the school is an instrument of governmentality con-

tingently, but nonetheless eectively designed from the ready-to-hand techniques of

training and management that were available from Christian pastoral care and that

get transposed into the new context of the state school. This ideal of the school and

its generalized social function in the production of self-regulating citizens makes it a

key instrument of state power and of state reproduction. The school belongs with a


26 R. Pedley, The Comprehensive School (Harmondsworth, 1978), 12731. See also J. Watts (ed.), TheCountesthorp e Experience (London,1977) and B. Evans, `Countesthorpe College, Leicester, inComprehensive Schools: Challenge and Change, edited by B. Moon (Windsor, 1983), 58.

27 See R. Seckington, `Community schools, in State Schools: New Labour and the Conservative Legacy,edited by C. Chitty and J. Dunford (London, 1999) for a nostalgic account of the golden era ofcommunity education in progressive Leicestershire.

28 Hunter (1994), op. cit., 74.29 Ibid., 74.

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range of institutionsthe prison, the clinicand civic practices that bring into being

a new form and new level of governmental intervention and practice into the lives of

the population. On this account the school is an instrument of power, but not so

much of sovereign power, which is visibly exerted, and not so much of ideological

power. It is in terms of `capillary powerpower that is decentred, which reachesinto daily practices and habits and is thoroughly institutionalizedwoven into the

fabric of social being.30

In terms of the history of education in England and Wales, 1870, at the `moment

when the state makes its crucial and explicit intervention into state education a

momentous transformation occurs (or begins to occur), not simply involving the

extension of state power, but also the transformation of state power. Through the

potential practices of the school, and through state education conceived of as uni-

versal, the population as a whole becomes accessible (if not amenable) to a special

form of transformational governance. This process `occurs less at a xed point intime than in the `ontological moment of the institution of the school. This moment

can be seen as continuous with the present era. The gure of the contemporary

teacher is continuous with the vision of Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, albeit overlaid

with various grafted extensions of practice and identity. Contemporary additions to

the technologies of the teacher (Bromcom electronic surveillance systems, for ex-

ample) and human technologies (PSE, for example) are expansions of the pastoral/

disciplinary gure of nineteenth-century formation.

Where Foucault meets Derrida: power and mobility

Foucault provides a powerful account of the transition from sovereign power to

governmental power which can be seen as realized within key social institutions

and their practicessuch as the school. The fundamental premiseof the movement

from externally visible sovereign governance to the invisible practices of self-govern-

mentprovides a cogent description of the economy of power and the condition of

`freedom within the liberal state. In the necessarily dual concept of pastoral disci-

pline the description of the school as a regime of care which is also a regime of

control and surveillance (the `shepherdock game according to Ian Hunter), the

complex and irreducibly binary logic of practice may be rethought. While this means

the school may have to shed its liberal aspirations to free exploration and free self-

invention, the binary logic of pastoral discipline may provide a more competent

metaphor to account for how schools work and to account for how interventions

into practice may be conceptualized and realized. This is partly a matter of dening

limits and variables, partly a matter of identifying the specic formation and social

technology of the school as institution.

Foucaults later development of the idea of power and of the history of the selfgoes beyond the xity perhaps implied in the `panopticonic account of capillary

power in the condition of governmentality.31 But it is Derridas rethinking of the

very idea of structure and the alternative account that may be derived from itof the

idea of culture, the self and of a politics of practicethat perhaps best oers an anti-

essentialist politics of practice. The `grammar of the school, its habitual semantics

and syntax, will belike all grammarsprovisional and partial. In the light of

186 N. Peim

30 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London, 1977), 185.31 Ibid., 1837.

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Derridas approach to language, the grammar of the school will have mobility and

dierence written into itself. Evidence of this mobility and dierence can be drawn

from the tensions between normative practices and the counter-practices they give

rise to. Ulla Johansson oers a detailed account of a plethora of tactics deployed by

school subjects who both labour to acquire the cultural capital that schooling mayoer and the same time labour to subvert, avoid, soften and generally manage the

disciplinary practices of the school.32

A `grammatology of schoolingwith its multiple logic of dierence, of the trace,

the necessary supplementemphasizes the invertible binary structures of thought.

To account for the historical continuities as well as the historical specicities requires

such a complex phenomenology. The given structures are subject to a logic of

deconstruction that can expose the central myths of the legislative discourses of

educationand its teleological claims to natural self-development. Educational dis-

courses, of course, like any other central features of the characteristic Western state,

cannot help but be redolent with the binary logic of Western metaphysics. While the

dierence that Derrida opens up between the project of rationality and deconstruc-

tion may mean that certain teleological aims must be seen as points of departure,

levers for creating new spaces rather than goals in themselves or end points of

progressive development, the denial of these grandiose and transcendental aims

may provide the occasion for an innite series of interventions and practices. This

actually relieves the would-be transformer from the blunt and painful disjuncture

between the rhetorics of reform and the confrontation with deeply embedded prac-tices that hinder reform or that corrupt reform from its well-meaning but structurally

impossible goals. Hence the powerful political point of Derridas thought.33

According to the position painstakingly established in Of Grammatology, the

logic of supplementarity means that the xed points, the specic ends and goals,

must always be seen as provisional, as irreducibly incomplete. Similarly, Derridas

principle ofdiVerance, whereby meanings are always subject to the logic of the trace

and are therefore always already multivalent, oers opportunities for dening and

working with points of intervention. Looked at negatively, supplementarity and

diVerance inform Derridas critique of the metaphysics of presence. Positively,

they may provide a form of thought for realizing the mobilities in social practices,

but also for taking into account the institutional determinations, clarifying points of

political intervention. For example, the setting of boundaries and limits on meaning

is the characteristic operation of subject knowledge. In the humanities this is critical

in relation to language and cultural practices where certain kinds of language are

deemed to be beyond the limit of educational discourses and where certain kinds of

cultural practices are excluded owing to the systematic privileging of others.

Derridas metaphysic, however, oers no direct access to a free and uncontaminatedspace beyond the limits. As Derrida has said explicitly:

I do not believe in decisive ruptures, in an unequivocal `epistemological break, as it is called today.Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably beundone.34


32 U. Johansson, `The symbolic meaning of school rules and routines, paper presented at the ECERconference, Lahti, 2225 September 1999.

33 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (London, 1976); J. Derrida, Positions (London, 1981).34 Derrida (1981), op. cit.

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Conclusions

Neither Foucault nor Derridas anti-essentialist phenomenology need be the pur-

veyor of an ethically vacuous Nietzschean will to meaning nor need they be associ-

ated with the (`vulgar) postmodern nightmare of meaninglessness and absolute

relativity. The writings of Foucault and Derrida in the eld of discourse, identity,ontology and meaning may be enabling for denitions of key social practices, in

which the selfas a given structure, overlaid and renegotiable but within limits more

or less prescribed by social structureis subject to denition, formation and refor-

mation. The modern school has been and remains an instrument of such complex

and double practices. Dening the structural conditions and features of the institu-

tion is a phenomenological exercise in dening the relations between limits and

possibilities.

It is important to `see that there are deep continuities visible in the genealogy of

the modern school, from the post-1870 elementary school to the overburdened con-temporary post-comprehensive school. Recognizing the structural determinants of

this continuity does not mean the school `itself is a given, static entity. The idea

of structure here has to be provisionalpalpable, but not essentially centred.

Structures are not and cannot exist without a signicant degree of play among the

various signifying elements. In turn, play between and among the various elements of

the schoolmemorably characterized by Ian Hunter as a `motley of cultural tech-

nologiesis not entirely without structuration, subject to the logic of the various

binary oppositions that determine identity, ideas and practices.

35

The anti-essential-ist phenomenology of poststructuralism does not mean that things are what we want

them to be, whereas it does eradicate the idea of the `thing-in-itself as it emphasizes

the powerful historical and culturalinstitutionalizedforces at work that have a

signicantly determining force and eect.

The Foucauldian concept of governmentality so powerfully deployed by Ian

Hunter in his description of the modern school provides an anchoring for accounts

of the shifting educational landscape of priorities, practices, discourses, the school as

an absolutely critical institution for the formation of a citizenry, the central govern-

mental function and its complex modern genealogy. It provides an account of therange of processes and practices, spaces and social technologies that remain funda-

mental to the ideal form of the school. A powerful embodiment can be seen in any

well-functioning contemporary comprehensive schoolwith its comprehensive

population subjected to a positive regime of order and productive pedagogy. Of

course, that account tends towards what Derrida might have referred to as

`structurality.36 It is the equally Derridean principle of undecidabilityvital for

the pursuit of an active professionally conscious politicsthat oers one tactic if

not an escape from the impossible dualism of the school as either a monolithic

technology of social surveillance or the instrument for liberation via the empower-

ment of knowledge, skill and the liberal dream of personal and social development

through the rebirth of community and the activation of `voice.37 The deconstructive

188 N. Peim

35 Hunter (1988), op. cit.36 Derridas antistructuralist position is succinctly expressed in J. Derrida, `Structure, sign and play in the

discourse of the human sciences, in Writing and DiVerence (London, 1978).37 See S. Ranson, Inside the Learning Society (London, 1998) and more recently, `The pedagogy of voice

and communicative action in a learning community, Centre for Policy Studies in Education lecture,

the University of Leeds, 15 June 2000. Stewart Ransons work represents one valiant and philosophi-cally serious attempt to sustain a modernist version of professional activism.

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intervention of the concepts of dissemination, `diVerance, supplementarity (all of

which dene language and representation as `the play of traces) 38 may unsettle the

stable logic of the liberal/instrumental binary oppositions that hinder productive

intervention by deploying a limited phenomenology.

Deconstructionas a technique for rethinkingcannot undo the power of thesepowerfully inscribed dualisms. Derrida has rightly insisted on the institutional rele-

vance of deconstruction. As a practice that makes points of intervention realizable it

has important implications for a politics of practice. The great oppositions in educa-

tionliberty against surveillance, for example, or the disciplinary against the pas-

toral, knowledge versus pedagogy, teaching against learningare inscribed in the

form of the institution. In relation to the fundamental features of the school as we

know itthe classroom, the teacher, pedagogya deconstructive theory may

problematize such oppositions, reveal the relations of complicity that bind them

together and redene the limits and the boundaries of possibility.

Between Foucault and Derrida there exists the potential for rethinking the pol-

itics of theory in the eld of education. This dicult pairing is contradictory, giving

rise less to the possibility of a modernist synthesis than a postmodernist agonistic

tension and dierence. In the eld of education, discourses are currently locked into

the functionalist rhetorics of `performativity on the one hand and the grandiose

rhetoric of the liberationary project on the otherboth are over-inated; both share

a vision of school as the driving force of the social. To object to both of these

impossible rhetorics is not to minimize the remarkable phenomenon of the `modernschools as an instrument of governance. It is to remind ourselves that schools are

structured by this fact. Schools are largely mechanisms for person formation, more

or less successfully deploying the human technology of self-governance. Their ideal

end product is the self-regulating, self-motivating and directing, `ideal subject of the

modern state. Would-be reformers of education need to understand better this deep

governmental function of the school. In order to conceive of a politics of education it

is vital to `see this enduring institution, the school. The `vision of this powerful and

enduring institution is available to us through the accumulation, organization andreorganization of the metonyms and metaphors of representationthe mobile archi-

tecture of knowledge. Of course, phenomenologically speaking, our description of

the school can never achieve completeness, but in an era when futurology projects

digitalized, virtual learning as the new world order of knowledge systems and liberal

concerns for social justice represent education as essentially an equalizing apparatus,

it might be timely to recall some key lines in the genealogy of the school. The school

as we know it was and remains a key instrument of a new form of governancea

socializing and moralizing enterprisethat sought and seeks to work on the trans-

formation of the self before it was/is ever concerned with intellectual capacities andqualications. Nikolas Rose characterizes this function in the memorable phrase

`governing the soul.39 An interesting supplement to this idea is contained in the

very Foucauldian idea that the school is also an instrument for the creation of the

soul, as it were.


38 J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Brighton, 1982), 6.39 N. Rose, Governing the Soul (London, 1990).

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Acknowledgement

Images are reproduced from The English School: Its Architecture and Organization,

vol. 2 (London, 1977) with kind permission of Roy Lowe and Malcolm Seaborne.

190 The history of the present

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the history of the present

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