Foucault and Educational Ethics

Bruce Moghtader

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137574961
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In his works on ethics, Foucault turned towards an examination of one's relationship with oneself and others. This differs from the modern approaches that explore the relationship between and the responsibilities of actors to each other by adopting criteria. Ethical criteria engender assumptions about the actors by focusing on their responsibilities. Instead of relying on criteria, Foucault's writing and lectures contributed to an awareness of the activities we take upon ourselves as ethical subjects. His reconstruction of the Greco-Roman ethics seeks to examine the possibilities of the reconstitution and transformation of subjectivity. Through this, he offers an avenue of understanding the formation of ethical subjects in their educational interrelationships.

Foucault and Educational Ethics

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Foucault and Educational Ethics

Bruce Moghtader

International Student Educator,
University of Victoria, Canada

© Bruce Moghtader 2016
Foreword © William F. Pinar 2016

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First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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ISBN: 978–1–137–57496–1 EPUB

ISBN: 978–1–137–57496–1 PDF

ISBN: 978–1–137–57495–4 Hardback

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www.palgrave.com/pivot

DOI: 10.1057/9781137574961

For my mother

Contents

Foreword

William F. Pinar

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

2 Methodology and Method

3 Present Educational Ethics

4 Archaeology and Genealogy

5 Power and Subjectivity

6 Educational Ethics

7 Implications and Conclusion

References

Index

Foreword

Recognition of the other as subject is present as one recognizes oneself as subject.¹

Bruce Moghtader

Long a preoccupation of philosophers of education, the “ethical turn”² in curriculum studies is relatively recent, promising to challenge contemporary understandings of curriculum as only political text. There is no better place to begin to grasp how intertwined these two key categories – the political and the ethical – are than Bruce Moghtader’s Foucault and Educational Ethics. While Foucault fades – a field once fascinated with his work has moved on, first to Badiou, then Agamben, evidently compelled to search for someone or something “new” – his intellectual influence, however invisible now, has not. Moghtader’s invaluable study enables us to see why. Foucault thought through – as he lived through – modernity’s bifurcation of the political and the ethical, its disavowal of subjectivity, its reification of power. Through parrhesia³ – “fearless speech”⁴ – Foucault taught us to rethink what we thought we knew, setting us off on our own experiments, resolved to reconstruct what others have made of us and the world we inhabit.

For Foucault critique is much more than criticism. Critique – like teaching, like study⁵ – is, in Moghtader’s fine phrasing, “a certain way of being and a certain rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1Introduction
• 2  Methodology and Method
• 3  Present Educational Ethics
• 4  Archaeology and Genealogy
• 5  Power and Subjectivity
• 6  Educational Ethics
• 7  Implications and Conclusion
• References
• Index