The Examined Life

Abstract

The spread of examination throughout educational institutions is often viewed as an overly constraining influence, one that distorts pedagogic relationships and prevents more genuine educational activities from taking place. This critique of examination ignores the extent to which the structure of the school and the soul of the child are already constituted by examining techniques. A survey of the 19th-century emergence of mass schooling shows that examining techniques have long been embedded in schools. The early development of mass schooling incorporated two distinct and enduring approaches to the formation of souls: disciplinary and pastoral examination. These examining practices would help construct the kind of self-governing subjectivities required by the nation-state. Those who seek to confront practices of examination today face a task that is far more demanding than it first appears. This confrontation would involve nothing less than a rigorous and wide-ranging critique of how examination and schooling in their various forms continue to assemble us as subjects of power.

Método Lancasteriano Y Virtualidad: Dos Estaciones en El Itinerario Educativo De La Gubernamentalidad Liberal

“…También los castigos tenían sus tecnologías apropiadas, como el Tronco, por ejemplo: un trozo de madera que pesaba de cuatro a seis libras, que se fijaba al cuello del niño culpable de su primer delito de hablar. Pero los delitos más graves encontraron sus respectivos castigos en el código lancasteriano, por ejemplo, las esposas, la 'caravana', la picota, el cepo, y 'la jaula', entre otras, que dependían de los lugares de recepción (SINGER, 2020;ALLEN, 2013). En fin, cada aspecto del proceso educativo tenía sus tecnologías asociadas, conjunto que conformaba la máquina lancasteriana.…”

Critical Pedagogy as Educational Resistance: A Post-Structuralist Reflection

“…Power works within a population to bring individuals into constructed forms of subjectivity, so as to secure normative behaviours and the stability and security of an always contingent and temporary existence. Schools are governmental institutions which, from their inception within the project of mass education, have been devoted to this purpose of subject-formation and government (Allen, 2013). From a Foucauldian perspective, the school is identified as a key governmental institution through which an array of micro-processes of power reach into the very body of the individual and seek to render the subject governable.…”

Schooling, Learning Disposition, and Life Course Transitions: A Life History Study on Korean Elite Adult Learners

“…] but it also follows its own 'individual logic' that is generated by the specific, biographically layered structure of experience" (p. 16). Schools, as institutionalized social learning management apparatus, have been considered to structure humans' learning in a specific way through standardized curricula, examinations, and degrees (Allen, 2013;S. Kim, 2015).…”