Abstract
The child, family, and community are sacred sites of modern politics and social welfare systems. Family values are what modern social reformers retort will bring national consensus and fight cultural disintegration. The health and the sanctity of the child are said to be pivotal for national preservation, social regeneration, and the progress of humankind. But the family and child are not just there to beguile and to recoup a paradise lost. The family, the school, and the community are historical sites of governing. This governing is not only the institutional procedures or organizational practices that provide the welfare “nets” for the family or to enable the education of the child. From the late eighteenth century, the child, family, and community have been subjects of regulating the intimate relations interests and aspirations as an instrument of regulating populations. “[T]he family becomes an instrument rather than a model: the privileged instrument for the government of the population and not the chimerical model of good government” (Foucault, 1978/1991, p. 100). The governing is embodied in linking of the development of the rationally ordered life of the child and family with the “political will” and progress of the nation.2
Excursus: “a digression” from the chronology of curriculum history. I would like to thank Mimi Bloch, Kenneth Hultqvist,Julie McCloud, Dar Weyenberg, and Amy Sosnouski for their comments as I worked on this paper. The discussion is part of a broader project of understanding the present that I currendy call, “The Reason of Reason: Cosmopolitanism and Governing Social Inclusion and Exclusion.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
American Council on Education. (1999). To touch the future: Transforming the way teachers are taught: An action agenda for college and university presidents. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.
Ariès, P. (1960/1962). R. Baldick, trans. Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life. New York: Vintage Books.
Bloch, M. and T. S. Popkewitz (2000). Constructing the parent, teacher, and child: Discourses of development. In The politics of early childhood education. L. D. Soto, (Ed.) New York: Peter Lang Publishers: pp. 7–32.
Boltanski, L. (1993/1999). Distant suffering, morality, media, and politics. G. Burchell, trans. New York: Cambridge Press.
Borman, K. (Ed.) (1998). Ethnic diversity in community and schools. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Breckenridge, C., Pollock, S., Bhabha, H., & Chakrabarty, D. (Eds.) (2002). Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chase-Lansdale, P. & Pittman, L. (2002). Welfare reform and parenting: Reasonable expectations. Special Issue “Welfare Reforms and Children” The Future of Children 12: 1. Palo Alto, CA: The David and Lucille Packard Foundation: 167–187.
Cronon, W. (1996). The trouble with wildernesses or getting back to the wrong nature. W Cronon (Ed.). Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature. New York: WW. Norton, pp. 69–90.
Curti, M. E. (1959). The social ideas of American educators, with new chapter on the last 25 years. Paterson, NJ: Pageant Books.
David and Lucille Packard Foundation Journal. (2002). The future of children.
Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children. New York: New Press.
Dewey, John (1916/1929a). American education and culture. Joseph Ratner, ed. Character and Events; Popular essays in social and political philosophy; Volume II. New York: Henry Holt and Company, pp. 498–503
—— (1916/1929b) Our educational ideal. Joseph Ratner (Ed.). Character and Events; Popular essays in social and poltiical philosophy; Volume II. New York: Henry Holt and Company, pp. 498–503.
—— (1922/1929). Mediocrity and individuality. In J. Ratner (Ed.). Character and events: Popular essays in social and political philosophy (II). New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 479–85.
—— (1928). Progressive education and the science of education. Progressive Education, 5: pp. 197–204.
Eldridge, D. (2001). Parent involvement: It’s worth the effort. Young children, 56/3: 65–69.
Elias, N. (1939/1978). The History of manners: The civilizing process. Vol. 1. E. Jephcott (Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Ferguson, R. A. (1997). The American enlightenment, 1750–1820. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Foner, E. (1998). The story of American freedom. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Foucault, M. (1979). Governmentality. Ideology and Consciousness, 6, 5–22.
Franklin, B. (1986). The first crusade for learning disabilities:The movement for the education of backward children. In T. Popkewitz (Ed.), The formation of school subjects: The struggle for creating an American institution. New York: Falmer, pp. 190–209.
Giddens, A. (1998). The third way: The renewal of social democracy. Maiden, MA: Polity Press.
Glaude, Jr., E. (2000). Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Government Printing Office. (1874). A statement of the theory of education in the United States of America as approved by many leading educators. Washington, DC: Author.
Greek, C. (1992). The religious roots of American sociology. New York: Garland.
Grose, H. (1906). Alien or Americans? Forward mission study courses, edited under the auspices of the Young People’s Missionary Movement. New York: Easton & Mains.
Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. J. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, pp. 351–94.
Hall, G. (1905/1969). Adolescence: Its psychology and its relation to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion, and education. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times.
Hidalgo, N., Siu, S., Bright, J., Swap, S., & Epstein, J. (1995). Research on families, schools, and communities: a multicultural perspective. In J. Banks (Ed.), Handbook of research on multicultural education. New York: Macmillan, pp. 498–524.
Hirst, P. (1994). The evolution of consciousness: Identity and personality in historical perspective. Economy and Society 23/1, 47–65.
Lasch, C. (1977). Haven in a heartless world: The family besieged. New York: Basic Books.
Lesko, N. (2001). Act your age: A cultural construction of adolescence. New York: Routledge.
McEneaney, E. (2003). Elements of a contemporary primary school science. In G. S. Drori, J.W. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez and E. Schofer (Eds.), Science in the modem world polity: Institutionalization and globalization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 136–154.
National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future. (1996). What matters most: Teaching for America’s future. Washington, DC: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (2000). Principles and standards for school mathematics. Reston, VA: Author.
Popkewitz, T. and M. Bloch (2001). Administering freedom: A history of the present–rescuing the parent to rescue the child for society. In K. Hultqvist and G. Dahlberg (Eds.), Governing the child in the new millennium. New York: Rout-ledgeFalmer, pp. 85–118.
Popkewitz, T. (2002). How the alchemy makes inquiry, evidence, and exclusion. Journal of Teacher Education, 53/3, 262–7.
Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. London: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, N. and P. Miller (1992). Political power beyond the state: Problematics of government. British Journal of Sociology, 43/2, 173–205.
Skinner, Q. (1998). Liberty before liberalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Steedman, C. (1995). Strange dislocations: Childhood and the idea of human inferiority, 1780–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
U.S. Department of Education (2001). Family involvement in children’s education. Successful local approaches. An idea book. Abridged version. Washington, D.C.: Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Educational Research and Improvement.
Wald, P. (1995). Constituting Americans: Cultural anxiety and narrative form. Durham, NC: Duke University.
Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the production of rationality. London: Routledge.
Ward, L. F. (1883). Dynamic sociology, or applied social science, as based upon statistical sociology and the less complex sciences. New York: D. Apple ton and Co.
Warfield, J. (2001). Where mathematics content knowledge matters: Learning about and building on children’s mathematical thinking. In T. Wood, B. S. Nelson and J. Warfield (Eds.), Beyond classical pedagogy: Teaching elementary school mathematics. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 135–55.
Wood, G. S. (1991). The radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2003 Marianne N. Bloch, Kerstin Holmlund, Ingeborg Moqvist, and Thomas S. Popkewitz
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Popkewitz, T.S. (2003). Governing the Child and Pedagogicalization of the Parent. In: Bloch, M.N., Holmlund, K., Moqvist, I., Popkewitz, T.S. (eds) Governing Children, Families, and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08023-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08023-3_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6225-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-08023-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)