The pedagogical illusion. For a genealogy and critique of our schools

This essay examines the school from a Foucaultian perspective, understanding it as an apparatus of government and the production of subjectivity through the means of educational practices. The first part genealogically examines some aspects of the pedagogical discourse of modernity, arguing that at its basis there is a persistent illusion: wanting to push subjects to self-government in order to guarantee government. This is a long-lasting illusion – and this is our thesis – one rooted in the early modern age and still active mutatis mutandis in more recent pedagogies, such as the neoliberal pedagogy, which has acquired hegemony over a pedagogy centered on constitutional-democratic principles. This is paradigmatically shown in the Italian case, which is why it is placed at the center of the second part of the essay. Indeed, in the Italian experience, one clearly sees the transition from a “Scuola della Costituzione” – which while democratizing the old pedagogical illusion still retained disciplinary and classist features was later challenged by the creativity of the ’68 and 1970s movements – to a factory-school of human capital, in whose laboratory such creativity increasingly comes to be subsumed under the performative and competitive logic of neoliberalism. The school can only be a place for exercising power and training subjects, but – and this is the meaning of the conclusion of the essay – under certain conditions, it can become instead a utopian laboratory for experimenting with and anticipating forms of a true democracy. As anyone who has taught or teaches knows, the school is indeed structurally characterized by this constitutive ambivalence.