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 the present article, such taken‐for‐granted ideas will be destabilised by analysing educational guidance as a practice in which confession operates as a technology that 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 shall 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; that is, we confess our inner desires to ourselves, thus participating in shaping desirable subjectivities. Our desires in life coincide with the political ambition to govern, and thus we govern ourselves.

Keywords:

• educational guidance
• confession
• governmentality
• technologies of the self

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments provided by Professor Nicky Solomon on an earlier draft of this article, and the constructive comments provided by the two anonymous referees.

Notes

1. Policy analysed as discourse drawing on Foucault means that questions about policy realisation are not in focus. However, such a focus would produce other, complementary results. See, for example, Coffield et al. (2007), and Beach (1995).

2. Research on policies of lifelong learning has been a growing field of research during the last decade. See, for example, Biesta (2006), Field (2000) and Coffield (1999).

3. Here, although based on another epistemology than the one used in this article, there is a parallel to Bernstein’s distinction between visible and invisible pedagogy. According to Bernstein (2001), a visible pedagogy is based on a hierarchical relation between the teacher and the taught, and the instructional discourse is controlled by the teacher. In an invisible pedagogy, such hierarchical relations are disguised and the students seem to have considerable control over the instructional discourse. Thus, as in this article, power is in a sense not as ‘visible’ as was previously the case.