4010 Spring08 Questions and Discussion 26
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Contents |
[edit] Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
[edit] Key Concepts
- habitus
- cultural/linguistic capital
- essential function
- external function
- ideological function
[edit] Dependence through Independece
The following passage is the one i've chosen for class, since it succinctly restates the ideas of the prior three chapters, and introduces the claims made in our reading.
Whether one sets out to analyse the communication of the message, the organization of the exercise or the assessment and sanctioning of the effects of the communication and the exercise, i.e. pedagogic work as the prolonged action of inculcation through which the basic function of every educational system is accomplished, or whether one seeks to grasp the mechanisms by which the system overtly or tacitly selects the legitimate addressees of its message by imposing technical requirements which are always, to various degrees, social requirements, we have seen that it is impossible to understand the dual objective truth of a system defined by its capacity to employ the internal logic of its functioning in the service of its external function of social conservation, if one fails to relate all the past and present characteristics of its organization and public to the complete system of relations prevailing, in a determinate social formation, between the educational system and the structure of class relations. To grant the educational system the absolute independence which it claims or, on the contrary, to see in it only the reflection of a state of the economic system or the direct expression of the value system of 'society as a whole', is to refuse to see that its relative autonomy enables it to serve external demands under the guise of independence and neutrality, i.e. to conceal the social functions it performs and so to perform them more effectively.[1]
To my mind, the last sentence of the quote above previews the two understandings of an educational system that the authors discuss; that of the technocrats and configurationists. Those who see in the educational system “only the reflection of a state of the economic system” are the technocrats. For them, the measure of the performance of a school is how well it meets the general aims of education, and “never before has the question of the ‘aims’ of education been so completely identified with discussion of the contribution education makes to national growth.”[2] (Before we get into NCLB bashing, we should bear in mind that this statement refers to 1970s Europe.) The authors argue that measuring productivity in this way reduces the school system to its external, social reproductive function, “so as to substitute for an education in culture…an education capable of producing made-to-measure specialists according to schedule.”[3] What this technocratic ideology obscures is that economic demand for labor is a fact of arbitrary, pre-existing power relations. Far from revealing that fact, instead it treats economic demand as independent of social hierarchy, thus claiming that the ability to get a job is of the same, general interest across all social divisions. The prevalence of this view of the relationship between education and socio-economics is demonstrated for the authors by the fact that “[e]ven the preoccupations apparently most foreign to this logic, such as the ostentatious concern to ‘democratize educational and cultural opportunity’ increasingly draw on the language of economic rationality, taking the form, for example, of denunciation of the ‘wastage’ of talent.”[4] The authors claim that this technocratic ideology tends to see the educational system in a deterministic way, where a progressive march toward better and better delivery of its economic aims is only a matter of measuring output. Thus the technocrats espouse “a negative sociology which, by light of an exemplary rationality, can see only failures and shortcomings…and can only characterize in terms of absence the pedagogic specificity and historical particularity of an educational system.”[5]
Those who see in the educational system “the direct expression of the value system of ‘society as a whole’” are the configurationists. Rather than see the educational system as an inevitable progressive overlap of general aims and performance as do the technocrats, “the configurationists reduce the specificity which the system derives from its relative autonomy to the ‘originality’ of a ‘national culture’, with the result that they are equally well able to find a society’s ultimate values reflected in its educational system or to point to an effect of education in the most characteristic and the most diverse features of its culture.”[6] The configurationists are determined to analyze the educational system in terms of the cultural configuration within which it is embedded, emphasizing the traditionalist, cultural conservation function of education to the exclusion of all else, including whatever concrete differences may in fact exist across social divisions or within specific schools or other educational arrangements. Rather than espouse the economic myth of the technocrats, whereby socio-economic mobility is the potential benefit of anyone, the configurationists claim that the educational system acts equally across all social divisions to ensure that cultural reproduction is the lot of everyone. “Thus, by suggesting with the amorphous notion of ‘social control’ that the educational system performs an indivisible, undifferentiated function for the ‘society as a whole’, all-purpose functionalism tends to conceal the fact that a system which helps to reproduce the structures of class relations indeed serves ‘Society’, in the sense of ‘the social order’, and through it the educational interests of the classes which benefit from that order.”[7]
After discussing the technocratic and configurationist views of educational systems, the authors introduce the ideological function of the educational system. If the technocratic view reduces education to its external, social reproductive function, and if the configurationist view reduces education to its internal (essential), or culture inculcating function, then the ideological function of systems of education is the fact that the relationship between the first two functions is obscured. This obscuration tends to legitimize the operations and products of educative institutions as if they were meritocracies, when in fact the opposite is the case. The authors put it best:Because the traditional system of education manages to present the illusion that its action of inculcation is entirely responsible for producing the cultivated habitus, or, by an apparent contradiction, that it owes its differential efficacy exclusively to the innate abilities of those who undergo it, and that it is therefore independent of class determinations – whereas it tends towards the limit of merely confirming and strengthening a class habitus which, constituted outside the School, is the basis of all scholastic acquirements – it contributes irreplaceably towards perpetuating the structure of class relations and, simultaneously, legitimating it, by concealing the fact that the scholastic hierarchies it produces reproduce social hierarchies.[8]
(For anyone interested in the language claims Bourdieu makes, there is some discussion of his Language and Symbolic Power written for a previous course, MSTU 5606-07.)
[edit] Panopticism
[edit] Key Concepts
- episteme
- Panopticon
- carceral system/continuum
- discipline
- amplification
- sanction/legitimacy
[edit] Parallels
Rather than discuss such a short piece, I though it would be helpful to indicate the passages where I saw the most overlap between Foucault and Bourdieu.
How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? What intensificator of power will be able at the same time to be a multiplicator of production? How will power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase those of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them? The Panopticon's solution to this problem is that the productive increase of power can be asured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty.[9]
To my mind this functional role of the continuous/discontinuous exercise of power is remarkably similar to the relative autonomy of educative institutions.
By means of a carceral continuum, the authority that sentences infiltrates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, collect, improve. It might even be said that nothing really distinguishes them any more except the singularly 'dangerous' character of the delinquents, the gravity of their departures from normal behaviour and the necessary solemnity of the ritual. But, in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. It receives from them, and from their lesser, smaller task, a sanction from below; but one that is no less important for that, since it is the sanction of technique and rationality. The carceral 'naturalizes' the legal power to punish, as it 'legalizes' the technical power to discipline.[10]
Beyond the overt reference to education, this passage's use of sanction from below and the naturalization of power seems similar to Bourdieu's use of legitimation and the obscuration that is the ideological effect of educative institutions.
- ↑ Pierre Bourdieu & Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 1990), p.177-8
- ↑ ibid, 179
- ↑ ibid, 181
- ↑ ibid, 180
- ↑ ibid, 186
- ↑ ibid, 187
- ↑ ibid, 192
- ↑ ibid, 205
- ↑ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Vintage Books Edition, 1979) p.305
- ↑ ibid, 309-10
