Doing philosophy of education

pp. 195-211

in: James D. Marshall, Michel Foucault, Berlin, Springer, 1996

Abstract

In philosophy of education we seem to have arrived at an impasse. From a position where analytic philosophy of education was seen to be at a cross-roads, to where it was seen to have been surpassed by marxism, we seem not to have settled upon any one methodology as a "paradigm". Perhaps that is healthy. However it will be argued in this chapter that Foucault may have something to offer philosophy of education, not merely in some post-structuralist or "after- philosophy" sense, but in the way that he looks genealogically at historical data and concepts, in what he called the history of thought (in contrast to history of ideas).