Foucault, Confession, and Education

Introduction

[T]he confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society… Western man has become a confessing animal. (Foucault 1998, p. 59)

If something useful about the present is said by Foucault’s (1998) argument that Western man has become a confessing animal and that confession has become the most valuable technique for producing truth in society, we will argue that we live in a confessing society. One of the primary arguments made by Foucault (1998) is that verbalization has become a central method through which people make themselves visible to themselves and to others and that people come to know who they are through verbalization. In his writing, psychoanalysis is used as an example of how previous Christian practices of confession have become appropriated by a secular scientia sexualis (Foucault 1998), which has spread to most aspects of private life. In this context, confession does not...