The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault's concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that worked on the child, rather than with the child. In order to understand how the child comes to be known and recognized as a learner, both at the intersections of normative conceptions of childhood and material expectations of the student, we use Biesta's three domains of education: socialization, qualification, and subjectification as an organizing framework and draw primarily from Common Core Learning Standards and related policy reports with the aim of reorienting educational work away from economic and political universals and toward a subjective response to the child as a human being with concerns, rights, and as a subject worthy of recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• The child
• neoliberalism
• Foucault
• subjectification
• common core

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Here we recognize plural definitions of knowledge including Foucault's (1972) term “knowledge” to imply meaning beyond representation, and to include the historical (subjugated) knowledge that is “buried and disguised” (p. 81) under formal, official, and universalizing systems, as well as (naïve) knowledges that infer to knowledge that is discounted, singular, and capable of opposition and struggle against a historical unitary.

2. Since Biesta is used here as an organizational framework, we see no contradiction between the Foucauldian concept that subjects as constituted through discourse and the discussion of socialization or qualification in and through schooling. The notion of transmitting particular societal norms presents the condition of possibility in which Biesta's third domain of subjectification arises. Biesta's framework does not assume passivity, but rather accounts for the child as a social actor always in the making.

3. Since Michael Brown's death on 9 August 2014, at least 14 other teenagers – at least six of them African-American – have been killed by law enforcement. These include Tamir Rice, Cameron Tilman, VonDerrit Myers, Jr., Laquan McDonald, Carey Smith Viramontes, Jeffrey Holden, Qusean Whitten, Miguel Benton, Dillon McGee, Levi Wever, Karen Cifuentes, Sergio Ramos, Roshad McIntosh, and Diana Showman (Schrochlic, 2014).

4. The No Child Left Behind Act was proposed by former President George W. Bush (2001) and provides federal funding “to states for schools that establish annual assessments, demand progress, improve poorly performing schools, create consequences for failure, and protect home and private schools.”

5. Race to the Top (2010) is a competitive grant program to encourage and reward States that are implementing significant reforms in the four education areas described in the ARRA: enhancing standards and assessments, improving the collection and use of data, increasing teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in teacher distribution, and turning around struggling schools.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Debbie Sonu

Debbie Sonu is an Assistant Professor at Hunter College and a doctoral faculty in the Urban Education Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research interests include curriculum theory and practice as it relates to urban schooling and social justice pedagogies in the United States. Her work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Teacher Education, and the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, among others. Currently, she is studying the perspectives of youth and children as they engage difficult knowledge and an understanding of violence and injustice.

Jeremy Benson

Jeremy Benson is an Assistant Professor of Educational Studies and English at Rhode Island College and faculty of the PhD Program in Education at RIC/URI. A former high school English teacher in New Jersey, he currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in ELA methods, social foundations, composition and rhetoric, and critical social theory. His research interests include critical policy analysis, the interimbrication of race and class in urban education, and social justice education. He is currently researching educational reform as spatial transformation, and working on a book about the interlocking cultural political economies of education and criminal justice reform in New York since the mid-1970s.