Abstract
This paper seeks to investigate how educational debates on the ideal of personal autonomy could benefit from Foucault’s concept of governmentality and his dictum of government as “conduct of conduct.” A view of education through the lens of governmentality allows for critical analyses of educational approaches that promote self-governance and lifelong learning. Taking as a starting point the widespread claim that the goal of education in today’s globalized world is to foster autonomy in the service of lifelong learning, I first illustrate the contradictions inherent in this and similar claims, focusing in particular on the ideal of the autonomous learner-subject as construed in discourses of language education. Furthermore, the construct of the autonomous learner-subject and its inherently contradictory nature can be traced back to the Enlightenment and finds its most prominent formulation in Kant’s assertion of the educational paradox. In the second part of the paper, I reframe the autonomy construct with reference to the notion of governmentality. I demonstrate how fostering autonomy in learner-subjects can be regarded as an act of governing others in order to improve their self-government. Instead of attempting to reconcile the contradictions inherent in the ideal of autonomy, it is more productive to view them through the lens of governmentality, which helps us conceptualize and contextualize more precisely the incommensurability inherent in the idea of an education for autonomy.
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Notes
- 1.
The entanglement of autonomy and heteronomy can of course be observed in many contexts, not only with regard to language learning . In general, homo sociologicus and homo economicus are by definition not autonomous as they are always positioned and position themselves in a complex network of multiple dependencies that grants them agency, but also imposes restrictions on them. However, further discussion of these observations would exceed the scope of the present article.
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Schmenk, B. (2019). Governmentality and the Autonomous Subject: Persistent Contradictions in Philosophies of (Language) Education. In: Lossau, J., Schmidt-Brücken, D., Warnke, I. (eds) Spaces of Dissension. Contradiction Studies. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25990-7_9
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