Reading: Benign Violence (Part I: Bodies)
By: Ansgar Allen related tags: #SchoolDiscussion
In these institutions, access to detailed records, accumulated by dispersed examining techniques, provided comparatively little in the way of depth; knowledge of each pupil remained shallow. By contrast, the soul of the moral training school teacher was selected for its apparent depth. This teacher was expected to convey some kind of indication or impression of the unfathomable depths of the soul. Teachers were now expected to be morally profound beings who exhibited in their bearing the rich qualities their students were expected to develop.
There are so many random bits that just remind me of things that I know I've said, and it feels really validating. I haven't read anyone else really say any of these things, but I do find it a bit ironic that this book is available via Palgrave Macmillan. If it's meant to be a radical text, it feels bizarre that it's basically available via a publisher who would benefit both from support of the current education system and a critique of it.
Anyway...
According to Foucault’s tentative genealogy,162 this ‘pastoral power’ originated as a governing technique in early Christian institutions. An arrangement was established within the church where certain individuals could, based on their religious eminence, serve others in order to achieve salvation in the next world. This governing regime would not issue commands from above with the expectation that obedience would be secured directly and through a unilateral relation. Rather, the exercise of power relied on the willingness of the pastor to develop a spirit of self-sacrifice that would guide his daily affairs. The pastor would deny himself not in the direct service of an all-powerful god, but through indirect means in the service of lower beings. These beings, in whose service he would place his soul, were his moral subordinates, the flock. To reinforce the connection between pastor and flock, the pastor’s ultimate salvation was constructed so that it depended on the success of this relationship.
His attention to the flock was divided between supervising the flock as a whole and attending to the unique facets of each individual, however ignoble these particulars might be. This required intimate and confessional relationships to be established, through which the pastor’s knowledge of the individual’s conscience and his ability to direct it could be assured. Pastoral care was not removed and distant; it was coextensive and continuous with life. It was linked to a production of truth, the truth of the individual self.
This is one of the things about teaching that I've often struggled to convey. It really feels a lot like a sermon or a mass, and it's probably because a lot of the historical roots are deeply connected.
The teacher now had to be imbued with an ethic of service.’ An ethic of this sort went far beyond the instrumental link established by devices such as the Revised Code of 1862 that set in place a system of personal and institutional incentives through what became known as Payment by Results. The pedagogue’s newfound ethic of service would, indeed, survive the eventual repeal of this code, having created a teacher who would associate his or her own subjective well-being with the fulfilment or lack of fulfilment of his or her pupils. In other words, the teacher developed an educational conscience. This was a portentous step; a secular educational conscience had been constructed through institutional means.
A conscience of this kind is still in operation today. My colleagues and I frequently experience its constructed effects. This conscience takes different forms, admittedly, having been realigned for the problems of a different age. In itself, this conscience is not objectionable. It should, though, always be suspected for the governmental interests it serves.
There are so many bits that highlight the inherent saviourism of the school. It's literally built into the profession in every way possible, and that is disgusting. Without actually dismantling the system and actually engaging with it, no one can fully escape it.
As with disciplinary power, any pastoral regime must be presumed to have its defects, and be seen as a system of only partial success. Alone, the pastoral teacher bore an impossible responsibility for the betterment of the lower classes and other socially marginalised groups. As it turned out, the success of pastoral technique depended on its integration with the activities of other actors and discourses. Fortunately for the pastoral schoolteacher, towards the end of the nineteenth century a rising concern for the health and hygiene of the population led to a proliferation of agencies concerned with the workings of the home. It was within this complex of agencies and ‘tutelary agents’ that the pastoral schoolteacher began to find support and adapt, supplementing a discourse of moral rescue with new discourses of hygiene and social health. The confessional techniques of examination also expanded at an increasing rate, adapting in turn to new institutional sites, allowing the shaping of the private self to become a widespread activity.
Another thing that I've definitely struggled to articulate clearly. This is something that still continues, though it has shifted in some degree. Previously, it was “public” institutions; today, it is largely interactions with private enterprise (or an NGO run by an entrepreneur). This furthers the “ensuring that people will become good workers as early as possible” idea that is later discussed.
Today it is almost impossible to sense what it would be like to live an unexamined life. This is not simply due to the fact that examinations are every- where, so much so that it would be difficult to pass through any modern system of schooling without being examined at one point or another. The problem is greater than objecting to the mere empirical spread of examinations, which have come to: regulate and record educational progress, or lack of progress; inform the relation between child and parent, guardian, relative or friend; suffuse practices of teaching and management; inform practices of social care, therapy and incarceration; back up or undermine policy; control access to further education; inform employers; condition employees and so on. The empirical spread of examination is certainly alarming, and yet the problem is greater than objecting to the extent of its reach. Expressing our profound disapproval of examination, as a ubiquitous rationality that defines our epoch and limits how we think, cannot in itself solve the difficulty we face. We must confront the examined life more radically than this. Perhaps we do live in ‘an age of examination’; perhaps it is indeed difficult to imagine how we could live differently without this incessant requirement to test and to score. But this is not a matter for the imagination to solve alone. This is not simply about picturing how we could educate differently, either without examination or with less of it. To say that it is about picturing how we could relate to each other differently would be closer to the point. Still, the difficulty we face in an age of examination cannot be combatted by dreaming what it would be like to go without examination and whether, by virtue of this vision, there is any scope for adjusting what we do, how we teach, how we learn, how we school. Examination cannot simply be removed and dreams cannot simply replace it.
First, examination constitutes the school as its ontological condition. To confront examination, one must confront the school. Second, insofar as dreams are wishes of the heart (as any Disney film will tell you), they will be limited by the sensibilities of the modern soul. As I have endeavoured to show, this soul may itself be the product of examination. Examination constitutes the soul of the child through a cluster of practices that make up the school. Since the nineteenth century, examination has produced the concepts or conceptual frame through which we have come to know ourselves. The monitorial school was an early laboratory in this effort, integrating a process that rendered an amorphous mass legible, with a procedure that taught the partitioned mass how to behave. The moral training school further developed this construction of the soul by teaching its subjects how they should relate to themselves, initially through an external set of architectures and interpersonal relations, and later through the absorption of these procedures to an inner conversation that constructed the self to be confessed. These two early nineteenth-century sites established the frameworks of schooling from which later institutions were built. They developed examining strategies that would feed into the expansion of a far wider examining complex. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the specific labour of producing souls was multiplying across an increasingly dense grid of social agencies tasked with revealing and directing the truth of personal and social life.
I have little to add to this piece, but I wanted to save the whole section so that I didn't have to hunt it down.
Any critique of examination and its deleterious effects should avoid the tendency we so often witness to high-minded indignation. It should avoid the temptation to denounce examination, that great institution, as a repressive influence against which the soul must fight in order to prevent its abridgement. The examining complex within which we were bred as infants now constitutes us as subjects; we owe our existence to it. A radical critique of examination must, therefore, begin by objecting to the subjects we have become. Here we must follow The Immoralist, who ‘despised ... the creature who was due to teaching, whom education had painted on the surface’.
Moments like this make me curious about the political intentions of Allen, but it also makes me feel like I need to read The Immoralist so that I can better understand what he's intending. The only thing I have heard about it is that it's a highly colonial book regarding Orientalism and Africanism.