People and Places

In Ideas in Historical Spaces, Popkewitz outlines an attempt to apply the crucial element of historical context to the writings of Dewey and Vygotsky to extract from their work a better understanding of the formation of their constructivist approach and their continuing influence on current educational reforms. I did not know that their thoughts did not impact education as practical answers to the rotting system, but were relegated to the realm of philosophy rather than applicable social science. These people’s lives coincided with the era of the formation of nation-states, large-scale projects of nation-building, and the political movements to constitute new state institutions to administer social and individual life. An idea of the “New man” emerged to realign loyalty from religion and inherited social order to individual responsibilities and discipline under the state. The state and civil society experienced a mutual conflation when “schooling [began to be used] as a mechanism used by the state to conceptualize and organize a massive and ongoing program of pacification, discipline, and training responsible for the political and social capacities of the modern citizen.” This is kind of scary. I was so sold on Dewey that I did not see this coming. Popkewitz so skillfully traps Dewey and his philosophy of education, as well as Vygotsky into a Foucauldian super-structure that makes me doubt the “goodness” of my own authentic experiences.

Popkewitz asserts that this new system of social administration to create participation also produce exclusion in which dominating binaries emerge as "a scaffolding of ideas that classified and normalized the subjective dispositions of children through conceptions that privileged a particular Protestant view of individuality that was English-speaking, male, and racially charged."

This created standard function in the governing of the self.