In this essay, Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein reconsider the concepts ''educationalization'' and ''the grammar of schooling'' in the light of the overwhelming importance of ''learning'' today. Doubting whether these concepts and related historical-analytical perspectives are still useful, the authors suggest the concept ''learning apparatus'' as a point of departure for an analysis of the ''grammar of learning.'' They draw on Michel Foucault's analysis of governmentality to describe how learning has become a matter of both government and self-government. In describing the governmentalization of learning and the current assemblage of a ''learning apparatus,'' Simons and Masschelein indicate how the concept of learning has become disconnected from education and teaching and has instead come to refer to a kind of capital, to something for which the learner is personally responsible, to something that can and should be managed, and to something that must be employable. Finally, the authors elaborate how these discourses combine to play a crucial role in contemporary advanced liberalism that seeks to promote entrepreneurship. OUR PRESENT EXPERIENCE OF LEARNINGThe word ''learning'' has come to be indispensable for speaking about ourselves, others, and society. As employees in an organization, we recognize our need for the competencies necessary to do our job, and learning is regarded as a process or force to generate these competencies. Furthermore, learning is not only part of our own vocabulary to articulate what is important for us as employees; managers, too, are addressing the learning force of their employees as an important source of a company's productivity. A reference to learning is also indispensable with regard to other domains. Our citizenship is not just perceived as a legal matter that is related to rights and obligations, but as a performance based upon particular competencies. Active citizenship and activities such as involvement and participation are regarded as necessary conditions for making democracy work, and these democratic competencies can be learned. Moreover, activities in the so-called private sphere are regarded as competency-based or requiring specific skills. A range of activities -from child-rearing, having sex, eating, or communication, to traveling and using free time -are regarded as being competency-based and in need of a prior learning process. Learning thus plays a major role in our world of experience, and we consider ourselves to be facing needs that can be addressed by learning.The aim of this article is to analyze this overwhelming importance of ''learning'' today. Our point of departure is the critical attitude of what Michel Foucault labeled an ''ontology of the present'' and more specifically the present
This paper presents an overview of the elements which characterize a research attitude and approach introduced by Michel Foucault and further developed as ‘studies of governmentality’ into a sub‐discipline of the humanities during the past decade, including also applications in the field of education. The paper recalls Foucault's introduction of the notion of ‘governmentality’ and its relation to the ‘mapping of the present’ and sketches briefly the way in which the studies of governmentality have been elaborated in general and in the context of research in education more particularly. It indicates how the studies of governmentality can be related to a cartography of the learning society, a cartography which helps us to get lost and to liberate our view.
The article starts from the questions: what is it to be an inhabitant or citizen of a globalised world, and how are we to think of education in relation to such inhabitants? We examine more specifically the so-called 'European area of higher education' that is on the way to being established and that can be regarded as a concrete example of a process of globalisation. In the first part of the paper we try to show that the discursive horizon, and the concrete techniques and strategies that accompany the establishment of this space of higher education, invite the inhabitants of that space to see themselves as entrepreneurial and autonomous entities. In the second part we show how this specific kind of subjectivation (this production of subjects), related as it is to this globalised space, involves what we call an immunisation that also affects our thinking and our ideas in and about education. To refer to this as a kind of immunisation implies that globalisation could in fact be considered a closing or enclosing rather than an opening up. We argue, therefore, that this immunisation needs to be refused in favour of the invention of other kinds of subjectivity, other ways of speaking and writing about the world and about education, such that we relate to ourselves in a different way.This article could be read as an answer to the question 'what is an adequate education in a globalised world?'. We want, however, to approach this question from a specific perspective, one that entails a kind of displacement. Indeed, we will not go directly into the question whether we really live in a globalised world and how this could possibly affect us and our idea about education. We want rather to ask what it says about who we are that we consider ourselves -or, better, that we are expected to consider ourselves -members or participants or inhabitants of a globalised world. So, the question from which we want to start reads as follows: who are we or who are we supposed to be, who are we invited to be, who are we interpellated to be, in Althusser's phrase, 1 as
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