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eBook details

Title: Schools and the Public Good: Privatization, Democracy, Freedom, And "Government" (1).
Author : Journal of Curriculum Theorizing
Release Date : January 22, 2005
Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
Pages : * pages
Size : 236 KB

Description

The movements to privatize American public education are justified and contested by renewed calls for the "public good." The public good, and its derivatives, the "common good" or the "public interest," are deemed to benefit from the privatization of public schools which will make them more efficient through competition. The idea of the public good, however, is also a stumbling block to privatization, since the public's interest in democratic schools is deemed threatened by their "marketization." Thus, the "public good" serves both sides of the privatization debate. But what kind of debate is this? I want to argue that this debate is about "government," but not in the sense we are used to thinking about the concept. Often, the "public" in public education means nothing more than that such education is state-controlled, but this inquiry is not primarily about political government's role in schools. My study treats the concept of government as a function of what Michel Foucault termed "governmentality," "government rationality," or the "art of government." (2) Foucault died before elaborating greatly on this notion, but by it he did not mean "government" in the modern sense of the term referring to political institutions. He relied on an older meaning of the term, one which referred to the ways "in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be designated: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick." (3) What we call "the state," according to Foucault, is but one of the forms that government takes, though unquestionably a very important one.