To be one’s own confessor: educational guidance and governmentality

Abstract

Educational guidance is often seen as something good and empowering for the individual. In this article, such taken-for-granted ideas will be destabilised by analysing educational guidance as a practice in which confession operates as a technology which fosters and governs specific subjectivities. White papers produced by the Swedish Ministry of Education will be analysed drawing on Foucault's concepts of technologies of the self and governmentality. I will argue that the practice of educational guidance fosters our will to learn through the technology of confession. We are not only confessing ourselves to, and are the confessors of others, we are also our own confessors, i.e. we confess our inner desires to ourselves, thus participating in shaping desirable subjectivities. Our desires in life coincide with the political ambition to govern, thus we govern ourselves.

The activating profession: coaching and coercing in the welfare services

“…They require clients to reflect on what they are able to achieve in the labour market, on the kinds of barriers they need to overcome and the steps they can make in order to improve themselves and increase their own employability. This is reminiscent of Foucault's notion of " confessional technologies", that has been applied to understand the modern spread of counselling techniques based in ideas that people can gain control over their lives through working on themselves and create knowledge of him/herself as a basis for improvement (Fejes 2008, Nguyen 2013. Born and Jensen (2010) call this kind of dialogue-based activation a "new dispositif", meaning that contemporary welfare policies require users to constitute themselves as creative and self-reflexive subjects in dialogue with the street-level bureaucrats.…”

“…Fejes 2008, Nguyen 2013). In the website of the International Coach Federation for example, coaching is described in terms of "setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change" and honouring "the client as the expert in his or her life and work", while core competencies are listed as co-creating a relationship, communicating effectively and facilitating learning and results.…”

Discourses on employability: constituting the responsible citizen

“…Questions of such reconfiguration concerning how to perceive government have been elaborated upon by researchers who draw on Michel Foucault"s (2007) concept of governmentality (cf. Dean 1999;Fejes and Nicoll 2008;Rose 1999;Fejes 2008). From such a perspective, government becomes something more than the government of the state.…”

Robbing Peter to pay Paul: the price of standards‐driven education

“…The work of Coffield (2004), Lucas (2007) and Wenger (1998) discusses the rationale being used to justify competing approaches to education. This debate also appears to link to recent work published by Fejas (2008) and Kelly (2009). These authors discuss the presence or otherwise of fluidity and creativity within educational contexts.…”