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The history of the present: towards a contemporary phenomenology of the school

Nick Peim Available online: 10 Nov 2010

To cite this article: Nick Peim (2001): The history of the present: towards a contemporary phenomenology of the school, History of Education, 30:2, 177-190 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00467600010012454

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HISTORY OF EDUCATION,

2001,

VOL.

30,

NO. 2,

177 190

The history of the present: towards a contemporary phenomenology of the school

Nick Peim
School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. e-mail: n.a.peim@bham.ac.uk

Introduction : towards a theory of seeing Phenomenology is that branch of philosophy that deals with the perception of phenomena. The contemporary era might arguably be characterized as embracing an anti-essentialist phenomenology. We know now that things are at least partly what they are because of what we call them, what we do with them, with how we distinguish them from other `things: in other words, how we `see them. We know also that we as `human subjects cannot be written out of the identity of the things that we see. How we are positioned, what perspective we take on things, where we `come from all these factors of subject identity are involved in determining the nature of the things in the world that we inhabit. What is more, these powerful variables will actually impinge on our sense of what it is that we see. In this sense the radical distinction between subject and object cannot be sustained. The great divide in western metaphysics between being and consciousness the foundation of so much in our culture can no longer be sustained.1 Clearly, this has powerful implications for knowledge. This paper seeks to raise some questions about our sense of the identity of things how we `see them and the implications of a particular way of seeing the school in the eld of education history. This article gathers together some notes towards an account for the speci c formation of the contemporary school as a social technology. It draws on a number of sources and perspectives, including a poststructuralist phenomenology and a partly Foucauldian account of the transition from pre-state education to state education in the nineteenth century. Some of the perspectives provide fresh possibilities for the meaning of the sources. This paper seeks to o a renewed interest in what David Hamilton has called the `theory of er schooling,2 though with a di erent emphasis seeks to present a case for establishing a `theory of the school where the school is an object of phenomenological enquiry. What is it? How does it work? What is its history or genealogy? How is this history inscribed in its characteristic form and practices? What are the implications for educational practices and interventions in the revised account of the school that will emerge from this process?

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1 D. Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London, 2000). 2 D. Hamilton, Towards a Theory of Schooling (London, 1989).
History of Education ISSN 0046 760X print/ISSN 1464 5130 online # 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080 /0046760001001245 4

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While claiming a deep continuity between the early elementary board school and the contemporary primary and secondary school, this paper is an attempt to refresh the theory of the school. It will seek to rede ne its genealogy, to propose a particular historical perspective with a view to opening up a sense of `the need to grasp the present as history:3 that is a sense both of history in the present and of the present as a mode of history. The quarry is an account capable of de ning the constituent elements of the contemporary school; and how these combine to create particular social e ects to de ne the relations between the school, its populations and the shifting social functions of the school as a governmental instrument for personformation. This in turn gives rise to questions about liberationist aspirations of much liberal critique that regards the school as the failed instrument of social equality, full personal development or democracy. There is a necessary and necessarily irreducible doubleness in this vision, one that seeks to account for the enduring social technology of the modern (post-1870 ) school along with the shifting relations between the school, populations, cultural practices, professional identities and policy.4 It is in the school as an instrument of person-formatio n that the deep continuities lie; in the school as a shifting locus of policy via the curriculum for instance that the mobilities are most evident. Interestingly, this position limits the possibilities for rhetorics of transformation while also providing a `syntax and `semantics for intervention. The propositions here are predicated on the idea that the school remains at the centre of the contemporary state in spite of various rhetorics of deschooling and prognostication s of school-less techno-futures.5 The genealogy of the school Although schools may have existed for countless centuries, the theory of the school that I am proposing is concerned with the speci c form of school as we know it the contemporary state school that can trace a direct genealogy to the elementary school of the late nineteenth century. For the purposes of this theory the school comes into being in 1870 although it is vital not to represent this moment as a kind of educational `big bang. Clearly, the general institution that emerges in the form of the state-funde d elementary school was developed from and in reaction to some of the existing models, ideas and practices and comprised the bits and pieces of ready-tohand human technologies.6 It must be equally obvious that this process did not happen all at once. The school did not emerge fully formed out of the 1870 Education Act. The process of its de nition seems to have been concerned with the developing conception of a number of key elements. Of particular signi cance was the `architectural organization of the social spaces of the school along with the clari cation of their symbolic social functioning. The classroom, the playground and the school hall all de ne speci c and related social functions central to a newly developed and still powerful human technology. This new formation also included

3 F. Jameson, `The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodern Debate, in The Ideologies of Theory, Essays, 1971 1986, Vol. 2: The Syntax of History (London, 1988). Quoted in S. Homer, `Frederic Jameson and the Limits of Postmodern Theory, http://vest.theorysc.gu.se/vest_ mails/0742.html, 1. 4 For Ivic the school itself is the `message in the McLuhan sense. See H. Daniels (ed.), An Introduction to Vygotsky (London, 1996) , 22. 5 I. Illich, Deschooling Society (Harmondsworth, 1973) and David Hartleys more recent and pertinent Reschooling Society (London, 1997). 6 I. Hunter, Rethinking the School (Sydney, 1994).

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Figure 1.

Varna Street School, Manchester (1904).

the de nition of the gure of the teacher, the expansion of the curriculum. In total, the `new school represents an array of spaces, techniques and occasions for the transformation of populations. There seems to have been a particularly intense period of development when the various pressures towards universal state education induced the development that produced a model which might be identi ed as general if not universal.7 According to the logic of pastoral discipline the school becomes the condition for contemporary liberal Western social formations.8 Discipline, through `the machinery of cultural regulation, is entwined with a regime of care the pastoral to enable a certain, speci c form of `freedom. Numerous accounts exist of the emergence of the form of the state elementary school in the nineteenth century.9 In these accounts the elementary school emerges from the bits and pieces of ready-to-han d practices that come to be reorganized into a new form of institution. The school as we know it, according to these accounts, has a relatively `shallow historical life. It is clearly distinguished from its more socially elevated contemporaries such as Lancing College or Christchurch College which can be seen from their architectural ground plans, components and building styles to be very di erent kinds of institutions with very di erent kinds of social function.
7 Hunter, op. cit., Hamilton, op. cit. and D. Jones, `The genealogy of the urban schoolteacher, in Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, edited by S. Ball (London, 1990), 57 77. 8 Hunter, op. cit. 9 D. Wardle, English Popular Education, 1780 1970 (Cambridge, 1970) .

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Architecturally and stylistically they enjoy a correspondence with the more grandiose aspirations of Oxbridge colleges and the higher spiritual orientations of their grand chapels. The new elementary schools, on the other hand as exempli ed in Varna Street School (Manchester, 1900) have a strong resemblance to the nineteenthcentury factory buildings that dominated the post-industrial revolution skylines of urban industrial centres.10 Indeed, the new elementary schools were conceived of and developed as responses to urbanization and industrialization, as responses to the problems of population management.11 But they were more than factories for the industrial production of subjects; they became complex institutions for the governance and transformation of populations. In another sense they represented a new form of aspiration for mass urban populations in that sense architecturally presented a sociocultural symbolism in their often (early) grand designs (up to c. 1900) and were structured and embellished accordingly.12 The school in this new sense took up its being at the centre of the newly ordered industrial urban landscapes that are represented in stark metaphorical form in the model town of Titus Salts Saltaire.13

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Figure 2. Saltaire.

10 R. Lowe and M. Seaborne, The English School: Its Architecture and Organization, vol. 2 (London, 1977). 11 I. Hunter, Culture and Government (London, 1988). 12 See J. Donald, Sentimental Education (London, 1992) and Lowe and Seaborne, op. cit. 13 Lowe and Seaborne, op. cit.

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In `Beacons of the Future , James Donald traces the development of the elementary school from its precursor, the Lancasterian school or monitorial school.14 These `proto schools are represented as being limited instruments on two main counts. In the rst place, their potential social function is limited by virtue of their monolithic architecture and arrangements of space. Conceived of as designed to manage the learning of large numbers via a rank-and- le ordering of all its pupils in a single space, the Lancasterian/monitorial school promoted a monolithic version of learning via repetition. The success of this model was evident in its capacity to induce the increasingly required qualities of literacy in large numbers. It proved an e cient method for instruction and in its monitorial form utilized the learning of its pupils as monitors in a kind of chain reaction of instruction. It was the proud boast of these schools that they could e learning for large numbers of pupils with the presence ect of a single instructor. This was partly achieved by the use of `monitors the second limiting feature of the monitorial school. Monitors were newly taught pupils who, once accomplished in the topic for instruction, could instruct their fellows a kind of unpretentious peer-tutoring. The monitorial, Lancasterian school, however, lacked the components of the elementary school that were being developed at the time, and that were to be combined into a new structure that would be the basis for the development of an entirely new kind of human technology. This new kind of human technology has been variously described perhaps most famously by Foucault as bio-power.15 The point of bio-power is that it represents a shift in the very nature of government and in the very nature of power. Bio-power works through the dual, but necessarily combined, forces of pastoral-discipline and its end point is the production of self-disciplining, self-regulating citizenry overlaid with an array of attributes. The pastoral element is perhaps best symbolized in the extensive systems of care for the health and physical well-being of children through the institution of the school conceived of a site for (social) transformatio n of the population. 16 The elementary school depended for its transformationa l function on the coming together of a number of critical components. First was the characteristic arrangement of space. The classic form of the elementary school is constituted of the following key spaces:
* * *

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the cellular classroom; the communal hall; the playground.

The cellular classroom represents a di erent space altogether from the open schoolroom of the Lancasterian school. This general `invention is the necessary spatial accompaniment of the emergence of the gure of the teacher, the bearer of the ethical technology characterized as pastoral discipline. The discursive roots of this emergence are generally traced to David Stows account of the prototype modern school in south Glasgow, the Glasgow normal school and the infants school. In relation to this new modelling of the institutional apparatus of care, Stow begins to de ne the gure of the teacher as the pastoral gure who shares something of the character of
14 Donald, op. cit. 15 M. Foucault, Technologies of the Self (London, 1988). 16 See especially P. Horn, The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild (Gloucester, 1989) and J. S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes (London, 1979).

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Figure 3.

Huntsmans Gardens Board School, She eld (1882).

the lives of the children he (sic) is to teach.17 The gure of the teacher located in the space of the classroom represents the emergence of the technique of pastoral surveillance that forms the core of the central social function of the school the transformation of subjects into a self-regulating citizenry. The classroom is the location for the development of `simultaneous instruction that becomes after several mutations the system of organizing the school population into regulated segments that can be treated to the normative processes of examination and training that characterize the social function of the school. The classroom also promotes relations of proximity (a loaded metaphor). It is the necessary condition of the `shepherd ock game through which the gure of the teacher can transform the unregulated human material of the urban populations into the trained and self-disciplined citizen of modernity. In this sense the classroom is both the material and institutional space for this relation and a metaphor of it. While this classroom emerges as the necessary technology of the new form of state elementary school, it signi es the opening up of a new kind of professional gure and function the gure of the teacher developed theoretically and practically by James Kay-Shuttleworth .18 In the cellular classroom the teacher could encounter `his pupils in the guise of a disciplinary pastoral technician committed to the transformation of this segment of the populace in a regime of pastoral surveillance. Simultaneous instruction contributes to this technology by dividing the school population into regularized units according to age and by also enabling the technique of interrogation and response that is the main method for the training of the self.19
17 D. Jones, `The genealogy of the urban schoolteacher, in S. Ball (ed.), op. cit., 57 77. 18 Donald, op. cit., 30 45. 19 Donald, op. cit. and Hamilton, op. cit. for accounts of simultaneous instruction and see N. Rose, Governing the Soul for a powerful account of the post-panopticonic condition.

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If the cellular classroom embodies the functions `simultaneous instruction and pastoral surveillance, it also represents the idea of normative development. The classroom is the location of the relations between the new professional teacher gure and the newly constructed segmentation of the population by age. This school population thus formed can be subjected to processes of normative development and care from statistical measurements of height, to the staged tested curriculum and the `nit nurse . The school hall being the site for general assemblies can be seen as the place where the idea of community can be expressed and enacted. Religious assemblies have been commonplace features of the modern school though they have also been supplanted in recent times by secular moral/ethical assemblies on conduct and values. The assembly hall is the place for the gathering of the population, for its daily routinized identi cation as a population subject to the shared rehearsal of values through exemplary moral tales, borrowing its style from religious practices of the sermon and concerned with the management of order in the institution and the inculcation of moral principles. In its most recent incarnation the assembly hall is more likely to pro secular moral guidance than religious and is likely to present er moral dilemmas as occasions for the development of moral sensibility and the problematization of the self in relation to the ethical as a technique for reinforcing the development of ethical substance.20 The general purpose of the elementary school is also represented in the idea of the playground. According to Ian Hunters account, the school could only function as a moral training ground with the dual technology of the gallery (the form in which the classroom is originally conceptualized, allowing eye contact between the teacher and the students) and the playground `the carefully crafted milieu of the playground .21 Both David Stow and Samuel Wilderspin had advocated the signi cance of the playground in their accounts of their di erently pioneering schools. For Wilderspin the playground constitutes an area dedicated to the cultivation of selfgovernment. In the playground working-class children `rather lthy if not legislated for learn to manage their own conduct in the company of their `fellows who are learning to operate under similar principles of self-restraint.22 Kay-Shuttleworth draws on David Stows Glasgow Normal Seminary to account for the dual function of the playground in allowing for free exercise recreation but also, through the unobtrusive presence of the gure of the sympatheti c teacher, to enable the development of `propriety of demeanour.23 In addition to the classroom and the playground the other main feature of the moral architecture of the school is the hall. Whether conceptualized speci cally in terms of space, or, as more recently, as the moral community of the school, the hall has classically enjoyed the functions of moral exhortation, moral homily, inculcation and persuasive dissemination of values. This is evident in practices that might be associated with bygone times of religious hegemony such as school hymn singing and bible readings that were part and parcel of the running of the primary school until well into the 1960s and more contemporarily hegemonic practices of ethical promotion, such as anti-racist exhor20 See for example J. M. Hull, School Worship: An Obituary (London, 1975), School Worship (East Harling: National Society (Church of England) for Promoting Religious Education, 1989) and Kent County Council Collective Worship. 21 Hunter (1994) , op. cit., 72 5. 22 Ibid., 73. 23 Ibid., 75.

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tations and lessons in self-improvement through work. In the space of the hall, or through the shifted practices of `collective worship, or the promotion of community values, the school discharges its ethical responsibilities and con rms its ethical social function in the spiritual training of subjects/citizens. The detailed regulations of the 1988 Education Reform Act con rm this sense of the signi cance of community above and beyond the speci cs of religious a liation. The essential form of the `ritual of schooling is retained but in transposed form.24 The `deconstruction of classic school architecture of classroom, hall and playground can be seen in primary school designs for open plan schools that proliferated in the 1960s. In this new architecture of the school:
. . . what in earlier designs would have been called the `classrooms have been divided up into smaller areas and arranged to form an open courtyard of irregular shape and easy of access from the covered teaching areas.25

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The open plan school is designed to realize the dream of the nineteenth-century state elementary school. Shifted through time, overlaid with policy and its historical residues, nevertheless the open plan primary school accords perfectly with the principle of the panopticon, with the socioethical aim of the production of the self-regulating subject. Its design is intended to re ect the re nement of this human technology. It goes one stage further perhaps with its breakdown of the di erence between spaces of spaces of play and spaces of work into one single but intricately divided space where the child orients itself in respect to its own capacity for self-motivation, selfdirection, self-instruction and general self-management. The end point, as it were, of this vision of the school can be seen in the modern liberal comprehensive school, perhaps the most illustrative example of which in the UK is Countesthorpe College. Countesthorpe was built in 1970 as part of the reali-

Figure 4.

Countesthorpe College, Leicestershire, 1970.

24 For a detailed account of the symbolic signi cance of ritual in schooling as an instrument of control and as a site for resistance, see B. Eggermont, `Choreography of schooling as a site of struggle, paper presented at the ECER conference, Lahti, 22 25 September 1999. 25 M. Seaborne, Primary School Design (London, 1971), 68.

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zation of the `Leicestershire plan and was conceived of as `the jewel in the crown of Stuart Masons avant-gard e attempt to restructure schooling within Leicestershire to meet the vision of the comprehensive school ideal.26 Leicestershire already had a tradition of open-plan liberal primary schooling and was working towards the construction of a cluster of `new liberal comprehensives. Here, in the very architecture of Countesthorpe College, we can trace the unlikely meeting of Andrew Fairbairn (Stuart Masons like-minded successor in Leicestershire), the modern liberal educator-bureaucrat , with Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, his not too distant liberal bureaucratic ancestor.27 The governmental function of the school Again, it is in Ian Hunters account that the synthesis of the school as an assemblage of ad hoc techniques (genealogy) arising in di erent `departments of existence becomes integrated into the special `purpose-built formative milieu that is the modern school `the instrument and the e of a bureaucraticall y organized pastoral ect governanc e of the population.28 The `remarkable thing about this `apparatus is its capacity to operate in di erent ethical and political registers at the same time, `to satisfy the demands of conscience and the objectives of government.29 Hunter s version of the emergence of the `modern school draws heavily on Foucault for its account of the speci c social technology it deploys. Hunters description de nes the limits and determines the structure of the modern school. It is deeply indebted to Foucaults account of the transformatio n of modern nation-state s from sovereign power to the notion of the pervasive decentred state that is inescapable in its exertion of power. The most frequently deployed metaphor for the description of the form of biopower represented by the post-1870 school is the panopticon, used by Foucault in Discipline and Punish to demonstrate the nature of modern, capillary power. In the image of the panopticon, surveillance is translated into self-surveillance. The prisoner in the cell is watched over from a central position but comes to adopt a penitent position of self-correction, internalizing the mechanism of surveillance with the ultimate aim of becoming the self-correcting, self-managing citizen. It is in the gure of the panopticon that the transition from the dominance of visible, sovereign power to the supervention of invisible capillary power is illustrated. In this account, government is transformed from something that is central, observable and accessible to something which reaches into areas of existence where previously it had been incapable of intruding. On this view the school is an instrument of governmentality contingently, but nonetheless e ectively designed from the ready-to-han d techniques of training and management that were available from Christian pastoral care and that get transposed into the new context of the state school. This ideal of the school and its generalized social function in the production of self-regulating citizens makes it a key instrument of state power and of state reproduction. The school belongs with a
26 R. Pedley, The Comprehensive School (Harmondsworth, 1978), 127 31. See also J. Watts (ed.), The Countesthorp e Experience (London,1977) and B. Evans, `Countesthorpe College, Leicester, in Comprehensive Schools: Challenge and Change, edited by B. Moon (Windsor, 1983), 5 8. 27 See R. Seckington, `Community schools, in State Schools: New Labour and the Conservative Legacy, edited by C. Chitty and J. Dunford (London, 1999) for a nostalgic account of the golden era of community education in progressive Leicestershire. 28 Hunter (1994) , op. cit., 74. 29 Ibid., 74.

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range of institutions the prison, the clinic and civic practices that bring into being a new form and new level of governmental intervention and practice into the lives of the population. On this account the school is an instrument of power, but not so much of sovereign power, which is visibly exerted, and not so much of ideological power. It is in terms of `capillary power power that is decentred, which reaches into daily practices and habits and is thoroughly institutionalized woven into the fabric of social being.30 In terms of the history of education in England and Wales, 1870, at the `moment when the state makes its crucial and explicit intervention into state education a momentous transformatio n occurs (or begins to occur), not simply involving the extension of state power, but also the transformatio n of state power. Through the potential practices of the school, and through state education conceived of as universal, the population as a whole becomes accessible (if not amenable) to a special form of transformational governance. This process `occurs less at a xed point in time than in the `ontological moment of the institution of the school. This moment can be seen as continuous with the present era. The gure of the contemporary teacher is continuous with the vision of Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, albeit overlaid with various grafted extensions of practice and identity. Contemporary additions to the technologies of the teacher (Bromcom electronic surveillance systems, for example) and human technologies (PSE, for example) are expansions of the pastoral/ disciplinary gure of nineteenth-century formation. Where Foucault meets Derrida: power and mobility Foucault provides a powerful account of the transition from sovereign power to governmental power which can be seen as realized within key social institutions and their practices such as the school. The fundamental premise of the movement from externally visible sovereign governance to the invisible practices of self-government provides a cogent description of the economy of power and the condition of `freedom within the liberal state. In the necessarily dual concept of pastoral discipline the description of the school as a regime of care which is also a regime of control and surveillance (the `shepherd ock game according to Ian Hunter), the complex and irreducibly binary logic of practice may be rethought. While this means the school may have to shed its liberal aspirations to free exploration and free selfinvention, the binary logic of pastoral discipline may provide a more competent metaphor to account for how schools work and to account for how interventions into practice may be conceptualized and realized. This is partly a matter of de ning limits and variables, partly a matter of identifying the speci c formation and social technology of the school as institution. Foucaults later development of the idea of power and of the history of the self goes beyond the xity perhaps implied in the `panopticonic account of capillary power in the condition of governmentality.31 But it is Derrida s rethinking of the very idea of structure and the alternative account that may be derived from it of the idea of culture, the self and of a politics of practice that perhaps best o an antiers essentialist politics of practice. The `grammar of the school, its habitual semantics and syntax, will be like all grammars provisional and partial. In the light of
30 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London, 1977), 185. 31 Ibid., 183 7.

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Derrida s approach to language, the grammar of the school will have mobility and di erence written into itself. Evidence of this mobility and di erence can be drawn from the tensions between normative practices and the counter-practice s they give rise to. Ulla Johansson o a detailed account of a plethora of tactics deployed by ers school subjects who both labour to acquire the cultural capital that schooling may o and the same time labour to subvert, avoid, soften and generally manage the er disciplinary practices of the school.32 A `grammatology of schooling with its multiple logic of di erence, of the trace, the necessary supplement emphasizes the invertible binary structures of thought. To account for the historical continuities as well as the historical speci cities requires such a complex phenomenology. The given structures are subject to a logic of deconstruction that can expose the central myths of the legislative discourses of education and its teleological claims to natural self-development. Educational discourses, of course, like any other central features of the characteristic Western state, cannot help but be redolent with the binary logic of Western metaphysics. While the di erence that Derrida opens up between the project of rationality and deconstruction may mean that certain teleological aims must be seen as points of departure, levers for creating new spaces rather than goals in themselves or end points of progressive development, the denial of these grandiose and transcendental aims may provide the occasion for an in nite series of interventions and practices. This actually relieves the would-be transformer from the blunt and painful disjuncture between the rhetorics of reform and the confrontation with deeply embedded practices that hinder reform or that corrupt reform from its well-meaning but structurally impossible goals. Hence the powerful political point of Derridas thought.33 According to the position painstakingly established in Of Grammatology, the logic of supplementarity means that the xed points, the speci c ends and goals, must always be seen as provisional, as irreducibly incomplete. Similarly, Derridas principle of diVe rance, whereby meanings are always subject to the logic of the trace and are therefore always already multivalent, o opportunities for de ning and ers working with points of intervention. Looked at negatively, supplementarity and diVe rance inform Derrida s critique of the metaphysics of presence. Positively, they may provide a form of thought for realizing the mobilities in social practices, but also for taking into account the institutional determinations, clarifying points of political intervention. For example, the setting of boundaries and limits on meaning is the characteristic operation of subject knowledge. In the humanities this is critical in relation to language and cultural practices where certain kinds of language are deemed to be beyond the limit of educational discourses and where certain kinds of cultural practices are excluded owing to the systematic privileging of others. Derrida s metaphysic, however, o no direct access to a free and uncontaminated ers space beyond the limits. As Derrida has said explicitly:
I do not believe in decisive ruptures, in an unequivocal `epistemological break, as it is called today. Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone.34

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32 U. Johansson, `The symbolic meaning of school rules and routines, paper presented at the ECER conference, Lahti, 22 25 September 1999. 33 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (London, 1976); J. Derrida, Positions (London, 1981). 34 Derrida (1981), op. cit.

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Conclusions Neither Foucault nor Derridas anti-essentialist phenomenology need be the purveyor of an ethically vacuous Nietzschean will to meaning nor need they be associated with the (`vulgar) postmodern nightmare of meaninglessness and absolute relativity. The writings of Foucault and Derrida in the eld of discourse, identity, ontology and meaning may be enabling for de nitions of key social practices, in which the self as a given structure, overlaid and renegotiable but within limits more or less prescribed by social structure is subject to de nition, formation and reformation. The modern school has been and remains an instrument of such complex and double practices. De ning the structural conditions and features of the institution is a phenomenological exercise in de ning the relations between limits and possibilities. It is important to `see that there are deep continuities visible in the genealogy of the modern school, from the post-1870 elementary school to the overburdened contemporary post-comprehensiv e school. Recognizing the structural determinants of this continuity does not mean the school `itself is a given, static entity. The idea of structure here has to be provisional palpable, but not essentially centred. Structures are not and cannot exist without a signi cant degree of play among the various signifying elements. In turn, play between and among the various elements of the school memorably characterized by Ian Hunter as a `motley of cultural technologies is not entirely without structuration, subject to the logic of the various binary oppositions that determine identity, ideas and practices.35 The anti-essentialist phenomenology of poststructuralis m does not mean that things are what we want them to be, whereas it does eradicate the idea of the `thing-in-itself as it emphasizes the powerful historical and cultural institutionalized forces at work that have a signi cantly determining force and e ect. The Foucauldian concept of governmentality so powerfully deployed by Ian Hunter in his description of the modern school provides an anchoring for accounts of the shifting educational landscape of priorities, practices, discourses, the school as an absolutely critical institution for the formation of a citizenry, the central governmental function and its complex modern genealogy. It provides an account of the range of processes and practices, spaces and social technologies that remain fundamental to the ideal form of the school. A powerful embodiment can be seen in any well-functioning contemporary comprehensive school with its comprehensive population subjected to a positive regime of order and productive pedagogy. Of course, that account tends towards what Derrida might have referred to as `structurality.36 It is the equally Derridean principle of undecidability vital for the pursuit of an active professionally conscious politics that o one tactic if ers not an escape from the impossible dualism of the school as either a monolithic technology of social surveillance or the instrument for liberation via the empowerment of knowledge, skill and the liberal dream of personal and social development through the rebirth of community and the activation of `voice.37 The deconstructive
35 Hunter (1988), op. cit. 36 Derridas antistructuralist position is succinctly expressed in J. Derrida, `Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences, in Writing and DiVerence (London, 1978) . 37 See S. Ranson, Inside the Learning Society (London, 1998) and more recently, `The pedagogy of voice and communicative action in a learning community, Centre for Policy Studies in Education lecture, the University of Leeds, 15 June 2000. Stewart Ransons work represents one valiant and philosophically serious attempt to sustain a modernist version of professional activism.

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intervention of the concepts of dissemination, `diVe rance, supplementarity (all of which de ne language and representation as `the play of traces)38 may unsettle the stable logic of the liberal/instrumental binary oppositions that hinder productive intervention by deploying a limited phenomenology. Deconstruction as a technique for rethinking cannot undo the power of these powerfully inscribed dualisms. Derrida has rightly insisted on the institutional relevance of deconstruction. As a practice that makes points of intervention realizable it has important implications for a politics of practice. The great oppositions in education liberty against surveillance, for example, or the disciplinary against the pastoral, knowledge versus pedagogy, teaching against learning are inscribed in the form of the institution. In relation to the fundamental features of the school as we know it the classroom, the teacher, pedagogy a deconstructive theory may problematize such oppositions, reveal the relations of complicity that bind them together and rede ne the limits and the boundaries of possibility. Between Foucault and Derrida there exists the potential for rethinking the politics of theory in the eld of education. This di cult pairing is contradictory, giving rise less to the possibility of a modernist synthesis than a postmodernist agonistic tension and di erence. In the eld of education, discourses are currently locked into the functionalist rhetorics of `performativity on the one hand and the grandiose rhetoric of the liberationary project on the other both are over-in ated; both share a vision of school as the driving force of the social. To object to both of these impossible rhetorics is not to minimize the remarkable phenomenon of the `modern schools as an instrument of governance. It is to remind ourselves that schools are structured by this fact. Schools are largely mechanisms for person formation, more or less successfully deploying the human technology of self-governance. Their ideal end product is the self-regulating, self-motivating and directing, `ideal subject of the modern state. Would-be reformers of education need to understand better this deep governmental function of the school. In order to conceive of a politics of education it is vital to `see this enduring institution, the school. The `vision of this powerful and enduring institution is available to us through the accumulation, organization and reorganization of the metonyms and metaphors of representation the mobile architecture of knowledge. Of course, phenomenologically speaking, our description of the school can never achieve completeness, but in an era when futurology projects digitalized, virtual learning as the new world order of knowledge systems and liberal concerns for social justice represent education as essentially an equalizing apparatus, it might be timely to recall some key lines in the genealogy of the school. The school as we know it was and remains a key instrument of a new form of governance a socializing and moralizing enterprise that sought and seeks to work on the transformation of the self before it was/is ever concerned with intellectual capacities and quali cations. Nikolas Rose characterizes this function in the memorable phrase `governing the soul.39 An interesting supplement to this idea is contained in the very Foucauldian idea that the school is also an instrument for the creation of the soul, as it were.

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38 J. Derrida, Margins of Philosoph y (Brighton, 1982), 6. 39 N. Rose, Governing the Soul (London, 1990).

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Acknowledgement Images are reproduced from The English School: Its Architecture and Organization, vol. 2 (London, 1977) with kind permission of Roy Lowe and Malcolm Seaborne.

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