Where are the students?

A major problem in “Power/Knowledge for Educational Theory: Stephen Ball and the Reception of Foucault” by Chia-Ling Wang is the writer’s implication that educational systems can be evaluated as a single structural paradigm. Wang seems to avoid any specification of who the students are or how they factor into her battle of thoughts and the people who think them. The UK and the Education Reform Act of 1988 are mentioned in Wang’s introduction to Ball (Wang, 2011, p 143), where teachers may occupy the lowest rung of the power structure, but students do not register at all.  Instead, a strange critical argument is given in place of any evidence: “Drawing on Foucault’s philosophy in the way indicated above, he argues that human beings are objectified in the manipulation of disciplinary power by means of evaluation, accountability and management. The discourse of management supposes a totalising social order and causal relations. This naive epistemic assumption, which is blind to the mobile complexity of lived experience, is what he wishes to gain distance from” (Wang, 2011, p 145). That any examination of educational policy (or theory applied in its name) should exclude education’s purpose must signal an unsound argument. Are they K-12? College? Public, private, rich, poor? Power allocations change depending on those answers, so the writer’s one-size-fits-all approach carefully avoids the questions.

Another issue I found with Wang’s paper is the subtle shift from educational policy to general theory. In the paper’s introduction, Wang states: “I provide an outline of the role of Foucault’s work in Ball’s theories, with specific reference to the concept of power/knowledge. I focus on Ball’s work because it exemplifies a prevailing mode of taking Foucault’s idea of power/knowledge into account, even though this is, as I try to show, at least partly at odds with what Foucault is concerned with in his use of this term” (Wang, 2011, p142). However, Ball’s work is introduced through policy and reform, the lived experience of education, not education theory. Pointing toward teachers’ powerless in the formation of curriculum, Wang writes: “Through techniques of management, control is exerted over teachers’ work, and schooling, governed this way, becomes embedded in the logics of industrial production and market competition” (Wang, 2011, p 144). But Wang soon abandons education entirely: “In contrast to Ball’s analysis of educational discourse, I want to draw attention to the way that discourse cannot, in Foucault’s view, be regarded only as repressive, or as totalising in a singular way. In his critique of the Victorian repression of sexuality, Foucault rejects the familiar hypothesis that after the 17th century the discourse of sexuality is prohibited or repressed” (Wang, 2011, p 148). Here, and indeed for the remainder of the article, Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge is misapplied to topics far beyond the parameters of the author’s intended purpose. It seemed like a desperate ending to reach a word count.

If I had all the power, I would reject this article.

If forced to make suggestions, I cannot ignore the pretense that everyone reading this piece will have some understanding of Foucault’s power/knowledge. No one does. Some explication of the theory must be included in the introduction. Secondly, a narrowing of whose education we are talking about. (Homeschooling is still education, yet does not belong in Wang’s little box.) Thirdly, the final, very broad section on Deleuze should be omitted and saved for another paper.