Governing for Responsibility and With Love: Parents and Children Between Home and School
By Baez, Benjamin Talburt, Susan
ABSTRACT. In this essay, Benjamin Baez and Susan Talburt analyze the U.S. Department of Education’s Helping Your Child Series to consider how the government of children, families, and schools reflects a concern with two seemingly unrelated political objectives of neoliberal projects: creating responsible, self-reliant citizens and making schools more efficient. Where these two objectives converge is in their techniques: they both use the parent-child relationship and what appears to motivate it. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of government as “the conduct of conduct,” Baez and Talburt analyze two pamphlets with an eye to several themes: the “commonsensical” nature of its address to loving parents; the “responsibilization” of parents and children; the insidious entry of school goals and behavioral norms into homes; and the seeming empowerment of the parent as partner in his or her child’s learning. Finally, the authors discuss how the logic of modern forms of governing families and schools might be contested.
If you expect your child to be well-educated, you have the responsibility of making sure your child gets educated, starting at home, with some basic fundamentals.
– President George W. Bush1
Our goal in this essay is to offer some initial understandings of the contemporary logic of the government of families, young people, and schools. “Families” represent a materiality that can hardly be denied, but they can also be thought of as sites of intense regulation. For example, Bernadette Baker argues that the “child” is not a natural phenomenon with natural laws guiding its natural development, but a political space for the production of categories, distinctions, techniques, and reasonings.2 As our epigraph suggests, the subject at stake in such a space is as much the parent as it is the child. The “parent” involves a spatialization of political rationalities that reconstitute the public responsibilities of the parent while seemingly preserving his or her private authority.3 Our task, therefore, is to uncover how the “parent,” the “child,” and the “school” are made visible and problematized, and how they are linked up in the ways that they are and to what ends.
Our concerns in this essay are not quite new ones. Throughout the twentieth century there have been shifts in relations between families, the state, and public and civil institutions. Particularly, these were shifts in the constitution of parental expertise, that is, of parental abilities to raise children appropriately, to foster their children’s assimilation into “American” society, and to promote their future service to the needs of businesses and industry. Christopher Lasch has argued that the social and economic changes of the Industrial Revolution led educators and social reformers to deem the family incompetent and to expropriate childrearing by putting it in the hands of the state and “helping” institutions.4 Overt, corrective control through management by professional experts and institutions, however, has given way to more subtle forms of regulation, often presented as “parent education” in the 1930s and in the late twentieth century, to offer families, again through professional expertise, the knowledge and skills necessary to help their children succeed.5 It is the modern workings of this latter shut in regulatory stances toward famihes that concern us in this essay, and that we will reframe in terms of “governmental” neohberal practices.
We use as a point of departure a series of “how-to” pamphlets “published” by the U.S. Department of Education. The Helping Your Child Series (which we refer to as the Series) seeks to show parents how to make their children better students, better citizens, and ultimately well-rounded, self-reliant adults. The titles we focus on include Helping Your Child Succeed in School, Helping Your Child with Homework, and Helping Your Child Become a Responsible Citizen. As the pamphlets are both highly repetitive and mutually reinforcing, we could have chosen any subset of them and found much the same things. However, we were particularly drawn to the seemingly more general topics of success, homework, and responsible citizenship (rather than subject-specific “helping manuals” for math, science, reading, and history, or “developmental manuals” for parents of preschoolers, early adolescents, and so on).6
Our decision to use these pamphlets for our analysis of modern forms of government associated with children and schools is premised on our understanding of (1) families and schooling as grounds upon which government must enact its practices for shaping conduct, and (2) neoliberal rationalities and technologies, which are less concerned with granting more authority to the state and other political divisions, such as schools – an authority that will always come off as a form of domination in the liberal imaginary – than with how individuals can be enticed to act on their own behalf.7 While the Helping Your Child Series certainly attempts to link the conduct of parents with the political objectives of the federal government, the scientific community, and American businesses, its logic is not one of domination, as it would be had the federal government sought to accomplish those objectives through legislation. Its logic is of empowerment. In other words, parents are given the tools and knowledge for helping themselves to help their own children, for navigating the bureaucracies of the schooling system, for using myriad institutions and resources to help their children be successful not only in school, but “in life,” as the pamphlets repeatedly say.
In the Series state and civic institutions employ a language of support and partnership toward shared goals for the young to address parents so that they will submit voluntarily to interventions that do not appear to infringe on the privacy and authority of the family. In other words, the technologies we analyze in this essay, following Lasch, “subject the family to ‘social management’ as opposed to the direct intervention of the state.”8 Our study extends Lasch’s argument by recasting those technologies within the Foucauldian notion of “governmentahty,” which we will explain shortly. We will argue that the Series reflects how the government of children, families, and schools reflects a concern with two seemingly unrelated political objectives of neoliberal projects: creating responsible, self-reliant citizens and making schools more efficient. Where these two objectives converge is in their techniques; they both utilize the parent-child relationship and what appears to motivate it.
Before proceeding with the workings of these political rationalities, we first elaborate in greater detail what we mean by “government.” Then we offer a gHmpse of two of these pamphlets in order to examine several recurrent themes: the seeming commonsensical nature of their address to loving parents, the “responsibilization” of the parent and the child,- the insidious entry of the goals and behavioral norms of schools into the home; and the seeming empowerment of the parent as a partner in his or her child’s learning. We then offer our understanding of the specific “governmental” problems that these pamphlets purport to solve. Finally, we end this essay with a discussion of our understanding of the logic of modern forms of governing families and schools and how they might be contested.
THE ART OF GOVERNING IN (AND THROUGH) SCHOOLING
Our study uses the terms “governing” and “government” differently than they are commonly used in studies of schooling. We follow generally Michel Foucault’s notion of “governmentality.” He did not use “government” in the modern sense of the term, that is, to refer to the political institutions or practices of the state. He used it to mean the “conduct of conduct,” or the ways in which not only the state (formal or political government) but myriad institutions, both “public” and “private,” or “state” and “nonstate,” seek to guide, shape, or affect the conduct of individuals.9 Governmentality, then, includes the ways social institutions seek to guide, shape, and direct the behavior of others and the ways individuals govern themselves and their actions.10 The rationalities of government address themselves specifically to the shaping of conduct, and are directed at making particular forms of reality thinkable and practicable both to practitioners and to the persons to whom their practices are directed.11
Rather than assume that the state is the government, or even that government takes place only through the state, as educational theorists tend to assume, especially when they question the imperatives of privatization, consumerism, corporatization, and globalism,12 we must ask how the state becomes “governmentalized.” As Gilles Deleuze points out, far from being the source of all power relations – and we would add, far from being the all-encompassing concern of such relations – the state presupposes them. Government, therefore, comes before the state.13 Given this, we may think of “government” in education as the ways in which the conduct of children, families, or schools is problematized and then made the end of techniques seeking to channel that conduct in particular directions and for particular purposes. Governing entails the guidance and shaping of subjects’ work on their own bodies and souls, or their beliefs, capabilities, and motivations, in projects pertaining to social progress or social welfare. Techniques of government may be disciplinary, individualizing subjects through hierarchical and lateral observation, surveillance, normalizing judgment, and the exam.14 Pastoral techniques may also link individual responsibility and abilities to the collective good, constructing the rules, or governing principles, that organize individual action and participation in the collective.15 As individuals come to embody certain qualities, they experience themselves through the capacities they have developed. Modern forms of government individualize in such a way that subjects understand their actions as based in autonomous choice and freedom to act. “Freedom” thus becomes crucial to social administration, which, in turn, appears to produce “freedom.”16
Governmental technologies are not by definition oppressive. Indeed, the Helping Your Child Series allows us, quoting Nikolas Rose, to “dffferentiate the exercise of power in government from simple domination. To dominate is to ignore or to attempt to crush the capacity for action of the dominated. But to govern is to recognize that capacity for action and to adjust oneself to it. To govern is to act upon action.”17 As he argues, this entails understanding what motivates and mobilizes individuals to be governed and to act upon these forces, to instrumentalize them so as to redirect them in desired directions.18 In our liberal form of government, the parents have the legal and moral ability to make choices with regard to their children’s education. They can choose a public or a private school, they can choose to dispense with formal schooling and homeschool their children, and, more important, they can choose to do nothing at all to help their children become successful students and citizens. The Series capitalizes on these choices so as to align them with other political objectives, such as creating academically well-prepared students and economically rational individuals. One may even say that what motivates this Series is a concern about parents who do nothing to help their children, and so it induces them to make “appropriate” choices by understanding and working on what mobilizes parents with regard to their children: civic responsibility and love. These noncoercive enticements enable what Foucault called the “art of government,” the creation of continuity between the ideals of the state and the actions of citizens so that all subjects govern themselves effectively, “which means that individuals will, in turn, behave as they should.”19
Our decision to use the Series for our analysis of modern forms of the government of families should not imply that we are making claims about its effectiveness. Our claim is not that it is effective in accomplishing its goals, or that any parent has read even one of the pamphlets. Our concern is with its intelligibility and the conduct it seeks to direct. It seems to us that the tendency of many scholars focusing on schooling, particularly those on the political left, is to focus on major political actions and discourses, such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) or A Nation at Risk. These are worthy exercises, but the Series illustrates to us, following Rose, that it is attention to the “humble, the mundane, the little shuts in our ways of thinking and understanding, the small and contingent struggles, tensions and negotiations that give rise to something new and unexpected.”20 This attention to the mundane, the technical, or the practical does not simply reflect a belief that these things are more telling than major political texts; it also reflects an understanding of governing that recognizes that it is most effective when the small, the mundane, the “everyday routines,” as the Series repeatedly indicates, get linked up with major political objectives,21 such as supporting NCLB, a relation made explicit in each of the Series’ pamphlets. These minor, technical, and practical texts, such as the Series, are worth attending to because they reflect (1) how minor shifts in conduct (for example, in one parent’s relation to his or her child, or in the everyday routines of families) are objects of governmental rationalities, for it is these minor shifts that (2) must be linked up with larger political objectives of creating (neo)liberal subjects. With this explanation of government as a backdrop, we now move into a discussion of two of the pamphlets in the Series.
“RESPONSIBILITY” AS A TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNING
Written in 1993 and revised in 2003, 2004, and 2005, Helping Your Child Become a Responsible Citizen begins with an inclusive mode of address.22 After quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., on the importance of “intelligence plus character,” the nameless authors of the foreword begin: “As parents, we all want our children to grow up to be responsible citizens and good people…We want them, in short, to develop strong character.”23 The foreword addresses parents as good, responsible, caring people who surely share the desire to raise good people, and quickly connects their desires to state policy: “The cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is academic and professional success built upon a foundation of moral strength and civic virtue” (BRC, ii).
In case morahty and virtue do not have intrinsic value for parents, the pamphlet underscores their “payoffs,” which have been identified by unnamed “experts”: “Research has shown that children who grow up with strong, positive values are happier and do better in school” (BRC, ii). And if happiness and school success are not enough for parents, the pamphlet offers an alternative inducement by warning of risks: “On the other hand, if children do not learn proper values and behavior when they are very young, problems can develop. These problems can mushroom with serious consequences as children grow older – dropping out of school, drug use, teenage pregnancy, violent crime – the list goes on” (BRC, ii). The list, however, does not go on to include deviances not typically associated in the national imagination with “urban” families. Problems such as becoming an accountant or CEO at Enron, working as a lawyer for Halliburton, or lobbying Republican lawmakers are not listed as serious consequences. At any rate, this pastoral mode of address admonishes parents that their individual responsibility to their children – whether they choose to lead them correctly or lead them astray – has a direct bearing on the collective good.
The pamphlet addresses a parent for whom enacting certain types of responsibility toward his or her child becomes central to his or her relation with the child. Indeed, it is only by redirecting the primary responsibility for ensuring responsible citizenship from the school to the parent that such citizenship can be effectively accomplished. In its introduction, the pamphlet explains that just like learning to tie their shoes, solve math problems, or understand scientific concepts, children must “be guided in developing the qualities of character that are valued by their families and by the communities in which they live” (BRC, v).24 The focal qualities for strong character include compassion, honesty and fairness, self- discipline, good judgment, respect for others, self-respect, courage, responsibility, citizenship, and patriotism. Unlike learning to tie shoes, these qualities cannot simply be taught by “set[ting] aside particular times or creat[ing] special activities” (BRC, 25). Rather, because the effective parent is the “child’s first and most important teacher” (BRC, 25), practices that teach and reinforce responsible citizenship must seep into every element of a parent’s and child’s shared life: “Rather than ‘things to do’ with your child for half an hour once a week, most of the following activities are more like rules-of-thumb or ideas to build into your daily lives” (BRC, 25). Thus, the loving parent is responsibilized and normalized with the child, for these aims can only be achieved through constant “guidance and modeling by caring adults” (BRC, v).
Central both to this pamphlet and to the rest of the Series are self-discipline and responsibility, not to mention the specter of their risky, unnamed opposites:
Learning self-discipline helps children regulate their behavior and gives them the willpower to make good decisions and choices. On the other hand, the failure to develop self-discipline leaves children wide open to destructive behavior. Without the ability to control or evaluate their impulses, they often dive headlong into harmful situations. (BRC, 6)
Readers are reminded, “Being responsible means being dependable, keeping promises and honoring our commitments. It is accepting the consequences for what we say and do. It also means developing our potential” (BRC, 15). As we discuss later, these qualities, particularly the regulated development of one’s potential and capacities, are integral to the lifelong learner, who will become an entrepreneur of the self.
THE MULTIPLE TECHNOLOGIES OF HOMEWORK
Helping Your Child with Homework, originally published in 1995 and revised in 2002, is addressed to parents of children in elementary and middle schools. We highlight this particular pamphlet because it addresses itself to one of the most mundane activities relating to schooling. Homework is so ubiquitous that it seems rather banal even to mention it. But it is anything but banal, as it is an object of great concern in schools.25 And, as this pamphlet illustrates, it serves many ends. The pamphlet starts by explaining the reasons for homework and its importance in furthering personal and scholastic goals. Homework is important not simply because it ensures that children apply concepts discussed in the classroom, but also because homework helps students develop “positive study skills and habits that will serve them well throughout their lives” (WH, 4). It teaches them “to work independently,” and encourages “self- discipline and responsibility” (WH, 8). Homework, therefore, is not simply an activity for furthering curricular objectives; it is a technique for creating independent and responsible future citizens. It is a political technology in the art of governing. Homework also is a venue for governing the behavior of parents. Parents must learn to value homework and to use everyday routines to support the skills their children are learning. Among other things, parents are advised to set a regular time for their children to complete homework, but not to “let [their] child leave homework to do just before bedtime” (WH, 10). Parents should also “pick a place” for their child to do his homework most effectively, a place with “good lighting” and which is “fairly quiet” (WH, 10). Parents should also remove distractions, such as a TV or phones; background music may be permitted if the child attends better with it, but loud noise from the CD player, radio or TV is not acceptable. The point is to maintain quiet premises for homework, and so parents are advised, “If you live in a small or noisy household, try having all the family members take part in a quiet activity during homework time. You may need to take a noisy toddler outside or into another room to play” (WH, 11). Parents are also told to reconsider their children’s activities, for if “there isn’t enough time to finish homework, your child may need to drop some outside activity” (WH, 10). The pamphlet even seeks to direct what gets discussed at home; family conversations must now be directed toward talking about homework (WH, 16-17).
But the assignment of homework to the child and the assignment of facilitating the completion of homework to the parent can be redirected to other political objectives related less to the child’s development and more to the development of parental expertise and empowerment. Homework can “help create greater understanding between families and teachers and provide opportunities for increased communication” (WH, 8). By monitoring homework, families can keep informed about what their children are doing and about the policies and programs of the teacher and school. It serves as a kind of surveillance of what schools are doing, and it gives parents knowledge and authority to question the school if they feel it is not functioning properly. Directions are given for how parents can contact the teacher when, for example, the homework instructions are unclear, the assignments are too easy or too hard, or the homework is assigned in uneven amounts (for example, too little on Monday but too much on Thursday). The parents are to talk with the teacher early in the school year. There are even directions on how to approach the teacher: parents are to do so in a “cooperative spkit,” and they should not to go to the principal without giving the teacher a chance to work out the problem (WH, 18-20).
Homework, therefore, serves a number of political objectives. It serves a civic function (involves parents in their children’s school), a disciplinary function (creates self-responsible citizens), and a bureaucratic function (makes communication between parents and school officials more effective). These functions coalesce to constitute homework as a governmental technology, for it helps parents to help their children govern themselves, helps schools become more efficient by shifting their functions to the parent, and allows parents effectively to govern the schools themselves. And the enticing nature of homework as technology is that it appears to develop parental authority over their child’s well-being.
SCHOOLING THE HOME, OR, THE “RESPONSIBILIZATION” OF THE FAMILY
Having said that the Series directs itself to everyday routines, and that these are important, we still have not said for what reasons. What are the problems to which the Series is posed as a solution? The Series is dieected at parents,26 which requires that we attend to how and why the parents are constituted as governable subjects. As we have indicated, the purpose of the Series is to help parents help their children become successful democratic and economic citizens, so one problem the Series addresses is how best to create that particular kind of citizenship. Creating a national citizenry has long been a goal of U.S. schooling, one that was consolidated with the late-nineteenth-century’s Republican anxieties about immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, African American migration from the South to the North, and rapid industrialization and urbanization.27 The Series reflects a similar understanding that schools cannot accomplish their goals alone. However, the nineteenth- century community project of creating a national citizen to embody an American narrative deemed the family a necessary site for the proper socialization of children to a national identity, and thus used myriad welfare agencies and institutions to join the school, community, and family in the project of Americanization. Now the individual, responsibilized parent is placed at the center.
It appears that historically the government of schools was geared toward creating particular kinds of economic and democratic citizenship, and as such, schools were invested with considerable authority over children. In contrast, the contemporary goal of promoting individual autonomy and self-reliance espoused by neoliberal projects requires that the responsibility for governance be shifted down to the individual as much as is feasible to accomplish that goal. So the responsibility of educating for effective citizenship must be shifted downward to the home, and parents are reconstituted in these pamphlets as their children’s “first and most important teacher.”28 One of the problems to which the Series is a solution, therefore, is the need to shift responsibility for one’s future away from political government (of which the school is an important part) to the individual. Thus, unlike in the Progressive Era, which fostered the creation both of a constellation of social scientific experts and institutions to intervene in family and community life and of professionalized teachers by equipping them with new knowledges about children, the parent is now not a passive recipient of corrective education for the home, removed from school life, but is placed at the center of responsibility for teaching.29 With what Thomas Popkewitz calls the “pedagogicalization” of the parent, “parenting is a surrogate to schooling.”30
Indeed, the key technologies of government have, for quite some time, been geared toward, following Rose, the “responsibilization” of the home. The home was to be converted into a space for the moral training of children and the pubic health of citizens.31 Furthermore, the Series with which we are concerned here illustrates that Popkewitz is correct that there have been deliberate attempts at the “pedagogicalization” of families.32 Successful parents are constituted as those who are “pedagogical,” that is, those who educate at home and who form “partnerships” with their children’s schools.33 But, this “pedagogicalization” of parents seems to establish much more than surrogate teaching; it establishes the home as a school, a kind of home schooling, if you will, that is not simply a proxy for the school. It is a school. It is not just the subjectivity of the parent that is at stake in the technologies the pamphlets elaborate: babysitting, table conversations, “everyday activities,” and even the physical arrangement of the home (for example, a special place must be set aside for the child to do her homework; televisions and other distractions must be removed) must also be problematized in such a way that the home will be converted into a school.
The task of governmental technologies, therefore, is to link parental and schooling responsibilities more efficiently by making them seamless, if not identical. And this must be accomplished by focusing on the parents’ choices. For forcing parents to do anything is inappropriate in liberal projects;34 the goal is to work on what motivates parents so that they act voluntarily. The Series recognizes that what motivates parents is a mixture of love and fear: a love that guarantees parents act in the best interests of their children, and a fear that failing to act will lead to disastrous consequences for their children and society as a whole.
Creating responsible citizenship is not the only objective of the Series, however, as the pamphlets must be read within the discourse on the “failing school.” Schools are deemed inefficient in academic and mainstream rhetoric, and so they too must be governed more effectively than before. How best to accomplish that? For one, by increasing the time spent in school. As Helping Your Child Succeed in Schools states,
If you think about it, although school is very important, it does not really take up very much of a child’s time. In the United States, the school year averages 180 days; in other nations, the school year can last up to 240 days and students are often in school more hours per day than American students. Clearly, the hours and days that a child is not in school are important for learning, too.35
In the United States, unlike in other nations, this pamphlet seems to say, there are obstacles, economic and legal ones, to be sure, but perhaps political and moral ones, to increasing the school day. Given this understanding, it is prudent to find ways to redirect the parents’ behavior in the home so as to increase the time in school without actually usurping the time parents spend with their children. In other words, another problem the pamphlet addresses itself to is how best to manage the time parents spend with their children so as to accomplish particular political and economic goals, certainly seH-reliance and autonomy, but also improving the United States’ standing relative to other nations. The state has the legal right to force more schooling on parents, but our liberal ideals make this kind of action inappropriate and perhaps ineffective in “acting upon the actions” of individuals. It appears to be more effective to work on what motivates parents so as to realign their wishes with the nation’s political objectives. The tactic of the pamphlets is to work on the understanding that no parent wants her child “left behind” and that all parents already “teach,” whether or not they see themselves as doing that (or whether they could be said to do so appropriately). It seems more prudent and efficient, therefore, to have parents “school” their children themselves. This requires changing the governance of schools so that more of the responsibility for education is shifted to the parent. Schooling will be more efficient to the extent that the behavior of parents is modified to accomplish its goals.
We can state this differently. Since under fiberal rationalities, parental prerogatives cannot be taken away without some loss, political and technical, these rationalities and techniques work best when individuals volunteer themselves to them. Thus, for schooling to work more efficiently, parents must voluntarily assume its logic, that is, parents must make the home a school. Just as schools assume the role of parent within the school – the logic of in loco parentis – now the parent must assume the role of the school at home – a logic of in loco scholasticus, if you will. The techniques of schools have to inculcate this parental obligation, on this parental choice to work with schools or not. By seeking to conduct their conduct, the school does not oppress parents, but allows them to choose otherwise, making the parental relation with their children more effective, making them responsible educators who love.
There seems to be another related objective behind the Series. The Series positions school and classroom cultural patterns as the model for interaction, and it addresses a problem of how parents might become instruments for ensuring their children’s capacities as objects and subjects of schooling. If education is shifted to the home, schools will be more effective because they are relieved of much of the, for lack of better words, “remedial,”"motivating,” and “supervising” work schools currently do. Parents are called upon to change their parenting so as to provide their children with appropriate educational activities that have them up and running long before they enter the classroom. The home now becomes “the foundation for learning…long before children enter school.”36 Parents can help children develop good study skills and habits, supervise the children’s homework, and ensure that they understand their lessons. Parents can also use “everyday routines” to reinforce what schools do. If parental behavior can be redirected so as to improve classroom learning, then the learning that actually takes place in schools will be more efficient in accomplishing their political objectives, such as improving test scores, creating economically rational individuals, and so forth.
The other pamphlets also empower the parents to police the school. For example, in Helping Your Child Succeed in School, parents are asked to learn everything about the school and to ask questions about specific teaching methods and materials. Parents are instructed to ask such questions as, are the methods based on evidence about what works best in teaching reading or math? Are the science and history textbooks up to date? Parents are told to talk to their children’s teachers early and often. They are even given advice about how to approach the school: “If you disagree, don’t argue with the teacher in front of your child,”"If the teacher’s explanation doesn’t satisfy you, arrange to talk with the principal or even superintendent;” and “Do not feel intimidated by titles or personalities.”37 Parents will now have double police work: they must police their children for the schools and police the schools for their children. They cannot abdicate this responsibility, even when they must work outside the home. Caregivers must be brought into line, too; the babysitter can no longer simply “sit,” she must teach, too.
PARENTAL EXPERTISE OF (AND FOR) THE HOME AS NEOLIBERAL OBJECTIVE
This art of governing schools through parents (and governing parents through thek children’s schooling), then, illustrates how neoliberal projects reconstitute the authorities governing individual and social behavior. Fred D’Agostino argues that liberal forms of government rely on experts to help us be effective citizens, but this thinking may need to be reconsidered, at least as it regards schooling. He argues that we (as liberal citizens) are beings who need to be worked on in order to be what we should be, and because we cannot do this ourselves, we need and want the services of someone who can help us achieve the integration of our multiple personae that we have failed to achieve ourselves.38 Lasch simuarly emphasizes the role of experts in modern forms of regulating the family. He argues that expert knowledge offers parental support that “enable[s] the citizen to shop more efficiently among prohferating social services.”39 But Pat O’Malley appears to take exception to this understanding of expertise for governing, at least as it works under neoliberalism. O’Malley suggests that neoliberal projects maintain a “jaundiced” view of the expert in government, as expertise is grounded less in the domain of the human sciences than in the “practical forms of indigenous governance that are maintained by…[neoliberals] as the hallmark of the entrepreneur.”40
Viewing the Series from D’Agostino and Lasch’s perspective allows us to see how the pamphlets provide expert advice on matters that parents are unable to handle themselves. How best to help their children learn is something for which parents must seek the advice of teachers and school officials. For example, a section of Helping Your Child Become a Responsible Citizen entitled “Working with Teachers and Schools to Build Character” tells us that parents “need the help of the community, particularly the schools, in reinforcing…values” (BRC, 51). Parents are advised to meet with teachers to tell them how the school can reinforce values, to get a copy of the school’s character education curriculum so that they can reinforce it at home, and to monitor any inconsistencies or conflicts in the values and messages the school teaches children.
But perhaps O’Malley is correct as well. The Series also indicates to us that it is the expert on education – the school – that needs help from the parents. The expert here is positioned as needing help, and it might be important in studies theorizing the school to attend to this potential shift in our understanding of expertise. Indeed, school-improvement studies make the empowerment of the parent a central technology for making schools more efficient, and they seek to reshape the teacherparent relation to one in which “both have mutual power and influence regarding the child’s education.”41 Only parents can help their children “want to learn in a way no one else can.”42 After all, the “hours in a school day are few and the time a teacher can spend with any one child is limited. Teachers need the understanding and help of families in supporting classroom instruction” (WH, 4). The pamphlets seemingly empower the parent as teacher, extending the school into the home and expertise to the parent so that both the school and the home work in the same way toward the same object: creating responsible entrepreneurs, or managers of the self. Parents, then, are positioned alternatively as supporting schools’ goals, as demanding that schools support theirs, or as watchdogs for schools’ missteps.
Whether the school or the parent is deemed the expert, the solution to the problem of governance in neoliberal rationalities cannot be to grant more authority to the school, to extend the power of the school in time, but to extend its reach in space, that is, to make the home a school, so that that the expertise of the parent over his or her child can be mobilized toward what the school cannot accomplish alone (only the parent can make the child want to read; the parent is the child’s “first and most important teacher,” and so on). Thus, under a guise of partnership with schools, parents who are said to be “experts” and “teachers,” and who are also said to be in need of experts in relation to their own children, are instructed by the pamphlets to exercise their expertise or their responsibilities through seeking help appropriately.
Parents must cultivate the dispositions, knowledges, and skills that allow them to be produced as good parents who can both school- at-home and involve themselves in schools.43 With a responsibility to monitor schools for quality and accountability, parents who exercise their autonomy and capacities for action must have some expertise, whether their own or that which is easily available to them. The Helping Your Child Series thus appears to make an interesting intervention in the self-help industry: rather than leaving parents at the mercy of the market as they search for information to be “effective parents” of “successful children,” these pamphlets are “in the public domain” (see, for example, BRC, i).44 Addressing parents as empowered citizens through NCLB’s motto of “expanded options for parents,” the Series positions parents as concerned citizens who desire to help their children succeed in attaining schooling’s goals. In addition to the advice and activities offered throughout the pamphlets, each offers particularly motivated parents a list of further resources on the topic in question. These resources could be said to be emblematic of the spirit of the Series itself: they represent a partnership of the public and private spheres, with some resources coming from the state and foundations and others from corporate or private entities. Positioned as partner or collaborator within a network of partnering entities, the empowered parent indeed has choices for how to support the goals of schooling.45 We have indicated that the Series reflects two interrelated political objectives, creating responsibility and school efficiency through the enticement of parental motives and behavior. But even the second objective can be subsumed under the first, since the reason for maintaining efficient schools is to create self-reliance or self-government. Techniques seeking to create self-government are the distinguishing feature of fiberal governmental rationahties. As Barbara Cruikshank argues, individual subjects are transformed into citizens by technologies of citizenship: discourses, programs, and other tactics aimed at making individuals politically active and capable of self-government.46 Liberal democratic governance, Cruikshank argues, is premised not so much upon the autonomy or the rights of individuals – although the Series must entice the promotion of these rights in parents so that they take ownership over their children’s education – as upon their social fabrication as citizens, a fact that is obscured when citizenship is regarded as a solution to the problems of apathy, alienation, or the breakdown of civic association,47 on the one hand, and dominance, on the other. Technologies of citizenship operate according to a political rationality for governing people in ways that promote their autonomy, seH-sufficiency, and political engagement.48 Linking the aims of schooling with those of parenting to create a mutually supportive and reinforcing partnership is one such technology for free subjects who are loving, responsible parents whose private home lives cannot be legislated in liberal forms of government without some loss, political and technical.
Educational theorists who focus on the state, then, overlook the workings of these technologies in neoliberal forms of government. For example, Amy Gutmann has referred to three “states” to define ideas and practices of the relation of the child, the family, and schooling: the family state, the state of families, and the state of individuals. In the family state, the state has moral authority (because it is good and just) and thus exclusive educational authority in the name of community solidarity to establish harmony between the individual and the social good.49 The state of families, in contrast, is based in liberal conceptualizations of parental authority as a natural right and would grant educational authority exclusively to parents.50 As a mediating point between these stances, the state of individuals seeks to moderate the power of the state’s political objectives and families’ personal objectives by placing authority in neutral “experts,” or educational professionals who are seemingly motivated solely by the interests of children.51 Rather than compartmentalizing these authorities in discrete locations, we would argue that contemporary forms of government merge them such that responsible parents seemingly make authoritative choices, guided by an array of technologies that produce them as autonomous, meaningful actors in their child’s education.
As we have pointed out, political concern with the family is not new. Indeed, worries over national degeneration often targeted home life, whether through hereditary or environmental causes, as a potential source of deterioration and a site for intervention.52 Foucault suggested that early in the modern period the family was seen as a microcosm of a state or community and therefore as providing a model for its government and for bringing economy into the functioning of the state, which could be understood in terms of how the head of the household governs his family. But later, beginning in the eighteenth century, the family became the instrument for the governance of the population. The problems of the population (its diseases, its wealth, its fertility rates), all made visible by statistics, were irreducible to the family, which disappears as the model of government, and what “emerges into prominence is the family considered as an element internal to the population, and as a fundamental instrument in its government.”53 The family becomes a segment of government, but a privileged one, since a great deal of information about the population must be gotten through the family. Thus, the “family becomes an instrument rather than a model: the privileged instrument for the government of a population and the chimerical model of good government.”54
In this new version of government – the model of government that informs and is reinforced by the Series – neoliberal rationality guides the constitution of subjects. Individual autonomy, important to classic liberalism, is rewritten by neoliberalism as integral to the exercise of power as subjects participate in their own governance. Neoliberal rationality positions subjects as actors who are “free to” and “responsible for” the administration of their own lives. Parents and children as lifelong learners are “free” to continually recreate the self through a life that “becomes a continuous course of personal responsibility and self-management of one’s risks and destiny the ‘autonomous learners’ who are continuously involved in seff-improvement.”55
Those of us on the left might tend to view neoliberal projects as promoting ideological and material oppression.56 But by focusing on the dominating aspects of neoliberal projects in these pamphlets, we fail to grasp how the “conduct of conduct” takes place through self- government, through freedom, through responsibility, and through love. Technologies of government in what Rose refers to as “advanced liberalism” are not premised on domination – on subverting the will of the individuals governed. They conceive of individuals as active in making choices that will further their own interests. Thus, they must be “conducted” in such a way that they become active in their own government. The powers of the state are thus redirected toward “empowering [these] entrepreneurial subjects of choice in their quest for self-realization.”57 This does not mean that neoliberal projects are not dominating; we mean only to say that they cannot be understood solely under a logic of domination. As Cruikshank says, the “will to empower others and oneself is neither good nor bad. It is political; the will to empower contains the twin possibilities of domination and freedom.”58 It is the autonomy of subjects that is the target of government and not necessarily their domination.
Thus, the aims of government in neoliberalism must be aligned with political objectives in a way that understands what motivates subjects to act on their own accord.59 With regard to the government of families and schooling, it is the parents’ freedom to educate their children effectively that appears as the primary problem to which the Series is proposed as a solution – a freedom that is enticed and aligned with the school’s objectives. And for this to happen efficiently and prudently, one must work on what sets that space – that is, the parent-child relation – apart from other ones: love and responsibility. The parent as expert and educator enables that enticement by appearing to privilege parental autonomy in the private sphere, independent of “state interference.” The common critique of neoliberalism in education fails, we think, to grasp how enticing it is, how it seeks to initiate (not restrict) freedom in particular ways.
This may be a problematic argument for many of us on the political left, for liberal ideals make understanding any attempt to direct freedom as something other than domination difficult to grasp. But attention to governmentality requires that we avoid the pitfall of giving essential content to that which we call “freedom.”60 From this perspective, “freedom” has no content of its own; its meanings and manifestations are outcomes of the enactment of techniques and rationalities in the “conduct of conduct,” and as such it might be understood by the figure of a “tabula rasa” in the sense that “freedom” is constantly being rewritten to reflect the complementary and contradictory objectives among and between political, civic, and self-government. There is no particular strategy of liberal governmental rationalities; there are many of them, some effective in accomplishing their goals and others not, some relying on freedom and empowerment and others on authoritarianism.61 But contestation is part and parcel of the art of government in liberal projects, which are characterized by the principle that “there is always too much government.”62 Any attempt at governing is met with a resistance.
Rather than deeming neoliberal projects as essentially dominating, we might attend to how they “work.” We propose that they work by “acting upon the actions” of individuals, by understanding what motivates these actions, by enticing them here and thwarting them there, but all toward the objective of creating self-reliance and entrepreneurship of the self. We do believe that such practices seek to create particularly narrow, economic visions of what counts as valuable citizenship, but we also think that these practices can be countered, and indeed, they already are countered. The concern with governmentality need not negate political critiques of schooling practices that are dominating. We share with those who critique neoliberalism, following Rose, a “profound unease about the values that pervade our times… and a suspicious attention to the multitude of petty humiliations and degradations carried out in the name of our best interests.” But, as Rose further indicates, the point of this critique is not to put oneself in the service of those who purport to govern better, but to offer resources to those who have been constituted as subjects of government by others and who are entitled to “contest the practices that govern them in the name of their freedom.”63 We might recharacterize the “problems” that concern us in and about schools differently, especially those for which we seek solutions through research. We might consider these as counterattempts to govern ourselves contrarily. Thus, not all parents abide by the advice they are offered with regard to schooling. Not all parents are “responsible.” The task facing those of us on the political left might be to understand how such governing is thwarted, to see such resistance as also part of the strategies and struggles in the “conduct of conduct,” and to offer parents and children other rationalities and techniques for doing so. This resistance might be a way of thinking about the temporal gap between attempts at governing and the practices of self- government, and this gap should be expanded, not constrained, by technologies that see such resistance as problematic to any purpose, even one seeking to promote democratic conduct.
The overall point here is that attention to modern forms of government offers educators and those concerned about schools different ways of thinking about the new technologies and the new authorities that seek to govern children, families, and, indeed, schools themselves, especially when these are couched in terms of freedom and progress. This proposal about thinking differently is not to suggest that only by “thinking differently” does one avoid power and government. Indeed, one must also attend to how neoliberal governing strategies are predicated on subjects’ ability to think. It is to say, following Jack Bratich, that because thinking has been made governmental in liberal projects, it is also an important point of contestation.64 This understanding will mean, of course, that we must see ourselves as also seeking to act upon actions, and thus as crucial parts of the art of governing, with all their efficiencies and deficiencies and in their fits and starts.
1. As quoted in the U.S. Department of Education booklet, Helping Your Child with Homework (Washington, D.C.: Office of Intergovernmental and Interagency Affairs, 2002), 3. This work will be cited as WH in the text for all subsequent references.
2. See Bernadette Baker, “‘Childhood’ in the Emergence and Spread of U.S. Public Schools,” in Foucault’s ChaUenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz and Marie Brennan (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 138. See also Kenneth Hultqvist and Gunilla Dahlberg, “Governing the Child in the New Millennium,” in Governing the Child in the New Millennium, eds. Kenneth Hultqvist and Gunilla Dahlberg (New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001 ), 4-6.
3. See Barry M. Franklin, Marianne N. Bloch, and Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Educational Partnerships: An Introductory Framework,” in Educational Partnerships and the State: The Paradoxes of Governing Schools, Children, and FamiUes, ed. Barry M. Franklin, Marianne N. Bloch, and Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 6.
4. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1977), 13.
5. Christopher Lasch, “The Siege of the Family,” New York Review of Books 24, no. 19 (1977): 15-16.
6. The Helping Your Child Series, located at
7. On the decentering of the state and the diffusion of government into multiple forms and locations, see James Hay, “Unaided Virtues: The Neoliberalization of the Domestic Sphere and the New Architecture of Community”; and Shawn Miklaucic, “God Games and Governmentality: Civilization II and Hypermediated Knowledge,” both in Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality, ed. Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 165-206 and 317-335, respectively.
8. Christopher Lasch, “Life in the Therapeutic State,” New York Review of Books 27, no. 10 (1980): 30.
9. See Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),2-3.
10. See Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect, ed. Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104.
11. Ibid., 3.
12. See, generally, Deron R. Boyles, ed., Schools or Markets? Commercialization, Privatization, and School-Business Partnerships (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004); Manual Castells, Ramon Flecha, Paulo Freire, Henry A. Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, and Paul Willis, Critical Education in the New Information Age (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); and Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard, eds., Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
13. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 76.
14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).
15. Thomas S. Popkewitz, “A Social Epistemology of Educational Research,” in Critical Theories in Education: Changing Terrains of Knowledge and Politics, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz and Lynn Fendler (New York: Routledge, 1999), 25-26.
16. Ibid., 18-19, 25.
17. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4 (emphasis added).
18. Ibid., 4.
19. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 92.
20. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 11.
21. Ibid.
22. On modes of address, see Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).
23. U.S. Department of Education, Helping Your Child Become a Responsible Citizen (Washington, D.C.: Office of Intergovernmental and Interagency Affairs, 2003), 2. This work will be cited as BRC in the text for all subsequent references.
24. The pamphlet is careful to assure parents that its purpose is not to impose values on parents and children, but to partner with parents in order to empower them to teach values with which they agree: “Be assured that the qualities of character discussed in this booklet are universally recognized by people of many religions and cultures, and the information contained in this booklet can be used by parents from many different backgrounds and with different beliefs” (BRC, v).
25. See, generally, Frances Von Voorhis, “Interactive Homework in Middle School: Effects of Family Involvement and School Achievement,” Journal of Educational Research 96, no. 6 (2003): 323- 338.
26. However, occasionally reference is made to a caregiver other than the parent, such as a daycare employee, babysitter, or perhaps a relative, such as a grandmother.
27. Thomas S. Popkewitz and Marianne N. Bloch, “Administering Freedom: A History of the Present: Rescuing the Parent to Rescue the Child for Society,” in Governing the Child in the New Millennium, ed. Kenneth Hultqvist and Gunilla Dahlberg (New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 88, 90-91.
28. U.S. Department of Education, Helping Your Child Succeed in School (Washington, D.C.: Office of Intergovernmental and Interagency Affairs, 2002), 7.
29. Popkewitz and Bloch, “Administering Freedom,” 96.
30. Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Governing the Child and Pedagogicalization of the Present,” in Governing Children, Families, and Education: Restructuring the Welfare State, ed. Marianne N. Bloch, Kerstin Holmlund, Ingeborg Moqvist, and Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 53.
31. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 74.
32. Popkewitz, “Governing the Child,” 53.
33. This technocratic pedagogicalization contrasts in political orientation to Jane Roland Martin’s romanticized call for recognition that “school and home are partners in the education of a nation’s young.” But one can see how these arguments support each other. Martin also laments the lack of public acknowledgment of parents’ contributions to children’s development and argues that “the hidden partner knows its role and is willing and able to carry it out.” See Jane Roland Martin, The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6.
34. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 73.
35. Helping Your Child Succeed in School, 8 (emphasis in original).
36. U.S. Department of Education, Helping Your Child Become a Reader (Washington, D.C.: Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, 2002), 5.
37. Helping Your Child Succeed in School, 39.
38. Fred D’Agostino, “Two Conceptions of Autonomy,” Economy and Society 27, no. 1 (1998): 33.
39. Lasch, “The Siege of the Family,” 6.
40. Pat O’Malley, “Uncertain Subjects: Risks, Liberalism, and Contract,” Economy and Society 29, no. 4 (2000): 479.
41. Shobana Musti-Rao and Gwendolyn Cartledge, “Making Home an Advantage in the Prevention of Reading Failure: Strategies for Collaborating with Parents in Urban Schools,” Preventing School Failure 48, no. 4 (2004): 19.
42. Helping Your Child Become a Reader, 13 (emphasis in original).
43. See Franklin, Bloch, and Popkewitz, “Educational Partnerships.” 44. This democratization of help for parents appears to desire broad access, as the pamphlets can be reproduced “in whole or in part for educational purposes”; socioeconomic barriers, such as access to computers, are eliminated with a toll-free number to order printed copies; versions in Spanish are available on the Internet or in print; the government offers Braille and large print for our nation’s blind parents; and, of course, illiterate parents can order audiotapes of the manuals.
45. See also Lasch, “The Siege of the Family,”6, on the use of expert knowledge to offer parental support that primarily “enable[s] the citizen to shop more efficiently among proliferating social services.”
46. Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1.
47. See, for example, Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); and Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (1995): 65-78.
48. Cruikshank, The Will to Empower, 4.
49. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 22-28.
50. Ibid., 28-33.
51. Ibid., 33-37.
52. Bernadette Baker, “The Hunt for Disability: The New Eugenics and the Normalization of School Children,” Teachers College Record 104, no. 4 (2002): 663-703.
53. Foucault, “Governmentahty,” 99.
54. Ibid., 100. On “the transition from a government of families to a government through the family,” see also Donzelot, The Policing of Families, 92. This seems to contrast with Lasch’s treatment of the family as solely an instrument of regulation.
55. Popkewitz, “Governing the Child and Pedagogicalization of the Present,” 48.
56. See, for example, Michael W. Apple, “Comparing Neo-Liberal Projects and Inequality in Education,” Comparative Education 37, no. 4 (2001): 409-423; Peter McLaren, “Introduction – Traumatizing Capital: Oppositional Pedagogies in the Age of Consent,” in Critical Education in the New Information Age, Manuel Castells et al. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 14-15; Kenneth J. Saltman, introduction to Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools, ed. Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard (New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 3-4; and Nelly P. Stromquist, Education in a Globalized World: The Connectivity of Economic Power, Technology, and Knowledge (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 178.
57. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 142.
58. Cruikshank, The Will to Empower, 2.
59. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 50.
60. One can question the sophistication of elaborations on freedom in such classic texts as that by Isaiah BerUn, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). But from the perspective of governmentahty, one heeds less the ideas (and ideologies) such texts represent than what kinds of conduct they first problematize and then seek to solve using particular techniques.
61. For strategies that rely on freedom and empowerment, see Cruikshank, The Will to Empower, 43-66. For those that rely on domination, see Mitchell Dean, “Liberal Government and Authoritarianism,” Economy and Society 31, no. 1 (2002): 37-61.
62. Michel Foucault, “History of Systems of Thought, 1979,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 8, no. 3 (1981): 354-355.
63. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 60.
64. Jack Z. Bratich, “Making Politics Reasonable: Conspiracism, Subjectification, and Governing through Styles of Thought,” in Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality, ed. Bratich et al., 68.
Benjamin Baez
Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Florida International University
Susan Talburt
Women’s Studies Institute
Georgia State University
BENJAMIN BAEZ is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the Florida International University, University Park Campus, College of Education, ZEB 364A, Miami, FL 33199; e-mail
SUSAN TALBURT is Director of the Women’s Studies Institute at Georgia State University, Women’s Studies Institute, P.O. Box 3969, Atlanta, GA 30302-3969; e-mail
Copyright University of Illinois at Urbana. Board of Trustees, on behalf of its Dept. of Educational Policy Studies 2008
(c) 2008 Educational Theory. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.