Fruit, vegetables, fatness, and Foucault: governing students and their families through school health policy

Abstract

In an era of curricular accountability where everything from reading and math scores to body fat are events to be assembled, scrutinized, and standardized, the health‐conscious school plays an ever‐important role in community and the nation (or so we are told). This qualitative study analyzes interviews with school leaders in their role in creating educational policies that encourage students and their families to make health a priority. Theoretically, the work draws on the work of Foucault, specifically his writings on the governance of society and the self. The analysis reveals the ways in which notions of good health and how this should be achieved became, at this school, a basis for social evaluation and control. In performing this analysis I seek to problematize the enactment of school health policy as ideologically neutral, necessarily liberating, and inherently benevolent.

Keywords:

• school health policies
• discourse analysis
• Foucault
• corporeal regulation