As that slouching, slavering beast we call neoliberalism lurches through all corners of the education system creating havoc in its wake, remaking education in its own image, we need now more than ever to begin to think about how education might be different. Not different in the sense of going back to what was before, but different in the sense of possibilities not yet thought at all. What would happen if we use Foucault to think differently about education? This is what I attempt in a new book Foucault as Educator (Springer 2017).

In Foucault’s later work there are possibilities which indicate that pedagogy can be reconsidered not simply as a technique for the manufacture of imposition but as ‘the theatre of subject creation’. This is a political education par excellence. Education in these terms is a relation (or a set of relations) not an institution – an aesthetics of self-formation, that involves a fundamental re-signification of the categories of student and teacher, and their interactions, purposes and relations. In other words, this is the care of the self, the work of the ‘politics of the self’, a continuous practice of introspection, which is at the same time attuned to a critique of the world outside: This is not something we can do alone, and not something that comes easily. Education must become a site of practice and a space in which to acquire the skills and sensibilities of self-creation. As a framework for educational practice this suggests the need to attend to:

(1) An environment that encourages experimentation

(2) An awareness of one’s current condition as defined by the given culture and historical moment. That is; genealogy as curriculum (question of truth)[1].

(3) An attitude or disposition to critique; a focus on the production of a particular sorts of dispositions that would be valued and fostered, made explicit (questions of subjectivity) – like skepticism, detachment, outrage, intolerance and tolerance.

In all of this, education, the teacher and pedagogy are articulated not as skills and knowledges but as the formation of moral subjectivity, a form of politics, and a relation to ethics rather than to truth. This is not liberation but activation, an enduring engagement in the travails and failures of self-fashioning, experimenting with and choosing what we might be and how we might relate to others, not discovering who we really are. Here pedagogy becomes the practice of critique, learning by opposition, an on going critical insubordination aimed at destabilising truth, rather than learning it, an historising of excellence and beauty rather than appreciating it. This must rest on and contribute to a form of power relations that are enabling, creative and positive.

The teacher becomes a ‘genuine interlocutor’ and must nurture truth-telling, risk and relish challenges, create a public space where fearless speech is encouraged. That is, ‘Teachers and other professionals have ethical work to do on themselves, in order to avoid using experience as “terrorism” on those without it … whilst also facilitating their pupils’ ethical work’ (Julie Allen). The teacher-student relationship thence becomes a complex partnership, a dialogue and a series of experiments based on respect and mutual care and mutual development – a partnership that is open to constant scrutiny and revision – with all the dangers and risks that that might involve. Education as self-formation.

[1] Here drawing on the Greeks and Romans the curriculum would extend to include physical exercise, music, sexual habits, matters of diet as means of self-care.