The final Foucault and Education

The emphasis of this collection of papers is on using Foucault for thinking differently about education. A distinctive feature of the contributions is to mobilise a foucauldian attitude towards the historicisation and denaturalisation of what it means to be educated, and the privileging of a critical ontology of the self as part of wider projects for the critical reconstruction of both education as a practice of government and our modes of being as educational subjects. In relation to that, it is possible to identify four distinctive issues around which the papers of this collection coalesce: a) the formulation of a distinctive foucauldian ethical standpoint for a post neoliberal education; b) the mobilisation of the foucauldian concept of self formation to outline a different ethics of education; c) the sketching of a politics of the care of the self as a tool to remake the school as heterotopy; d) the use of the foucauldian analysis of parrhesia to rethink professional practice in education as a practice of self.