Chapter 94: Michel Foucault: A Theorist of and for Social Justice in Education

It is with a sense of irony and some trepidation that I embark on a chapter on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault for this collection. The task is ironic in that Foucault never claimed to generate theories of education (or anything else). Indeed, shortly before his death in 1984 Foucault offered a summary of his work, asserting that his ideas represented “neither a theory nor a methodology” (Foucault, 2003a, p. 126). He was deeply suspicious of theoretical pretensions, and one of his key contributions to knowledge was precisely to question what he called “the will to truth” in the human sciences and the theories and practices generated through them. Much of his work, which he labeled histories of “systems of thought,” sought to disturb the taken for granted assumptions, rules, norms and practices that underpin and make possible modern forms of knowledge and power that take the human subject as their object and target. Writing a chapter about Foucault, therefore, attempting to fit his work into the format of a theory of education—an institutional domain and set of practices whose self-understanding is premised on the very knowledge his work sought to critique—is at best a contradictory exercise.