What is called schooling?

Thesis

Much has been said about the accountable school, the performative school, the school wholly given over to a corporate cult of assessment and accountability; the monarchy of criteria; and the sovereignty of the exam. Lamentations resound as the trend deepens and the cult starts to bites. But let us look another way. Based on a two year ethnographic study of an inner city comprehensive school in North London, this thesis tries to illuminate all of those mechanisms, technologies, processes, and structures, through which an attempt is made to bind us to an order of truth, fix us to a regime of conduct, and render us subject to definite arrangements of knowledge and power. Regimes of truth, orders of conduct, and modes and mechanisms of attachment. Positing as problematic those studies which take as their object a part or aspect of a system or structure that exceeds them, this thesis tries to grasp something of the whole, standing beside the student and following the thing as they make their way through the school’s gauntlet, attempting to detail all of those moments in which they are analysed, classified, sorted, distributed, trained, punished, and corrected.

Authors: Buckley, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-a48d52v4g
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Keywords: Ethnnography; Accountability; Punishment; Managerialism; Discipline; School
• Subjects: Philosophy; Social Anthropology; Education