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FORMATION OF STUDENTS' BODY BUILD AS AN ELEMENT OF WESTERN EDUCATIONAL STRATEGY (IN M. FOUCAULT'S THEORY)
Dr. Marina Bogdanova, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation
E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Larisa Abrosimova, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation
E-mail: [email protected]
A R T I C L E I N F O
Review Article Received: March, 11.2019. Revised: April, 02.2019. Accepted: April, 08.2019. doi:10.5937/ijcrsee1901131B
UDK
37.032
159.925
Keywords:
M. Foucault, human corporeality, school,
disciplined body, disciplinary space, bio-power.
A B S T R A C T
Human corporeality is directly related to the space of education, although education is interpreted as, first of all, an intellectual process of cultural heritage transmission. Nevertheless, the formation of student's physical body build is an important component of the state educational strategy. In accordance with the objectives and requirements of state and society there can be observed global changes in human corporeality within educational activities: the transformation of the body as a biological phenomenon into a socio-cultural phenomenon or "politically subjected body". The authors use Michel Foucault's ideas as the methodological base of their study of a student's body transformation processes. Foucault's ideas suggest that power influences an individual and their authentic behavior through the disciplining of their body, that the aim of the new type of power - the bio-power - is to increase the productivity and efficiency of a human body in the conditions of capitalistic industrial production, and that school is a specific disciplinary area, which allows to meet governmental demand for a new method of control via the production of "obedient bodies". The authors come to the conclusion that in the modern educational model, despite democratization and humanization processes Foucault's trends persist because education continues to be the part of the technocratic discourse. Modern school is a disciplinary space fenced off from the outside world, where there is a rigid hierarchy and a system of differences, physical drill, regulation, etc. All these are conditioned by the fact that school honors a governmental request for a technocratic person.
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1. INTRODUCTION
Educational strategy as an element of governmental regulation is a concept, which makes up the base of a long-term planning in the educational sphere. It includes the most fundamental and essential policies and methods as well as the main directions and principles of the development of the educational system as a consistent social institution. Speaking of the educational process strategy,
Corresponding Author
Dr. Marina Bogdanova, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation E-mail: maraleks27(®mail.ru
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - NoDerivs 4.0. The article is published with Open Access at www.ijcrsee.com
it is important to bear in mind its multilevel structure. Firstly, there are externally oriented educational strategies, which include creating positive environment, managing student's attention, assessment and evaluation, scaling and ranging, disciplinary body practices and the system of praise and punishment. Secondly, there are cognitive strategies, which consist of revising, reinforcement and improvement of knowledge and skills. Thirdly, there are metacognitive strategies, which include the planning of the educational process, its monitoring etc.
The aim of this study is to discover the importance of the educational strategy level, which deals with its outer side. We revised Michel Foucault's ideas about a disciplined body and his statement that "the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body" in order to prove that Foucault's postulates are still relevant in
Education (IJCRSEE), 7(1), 131-136
today's technocratic society. Specifically we will discuss the importance of disciplinary body practices of cognitive nature, which are widely applied in education and which lead to significant transformations in a student's body according to the social demand.
2. THEORIZATION OF HUMAN CORPOREALITY: RESEACH PERSPECTIVES AND SCENARIOS
Human corporeality has direct connections to the educational sphere, although education is interpreted as, first of all, an intellectual process of passing cultural senses from one generation to another. Nevertheless, corporeality plays an extremely important part in the processes of teaching, upbringing and education. Within these processes, human corporeality undergoes global transformations.
In postclassical philosophy, the theori-zation of human corporeality has different research perspectives and scenarios, represented in the existence of numerous approaches and trends: existential-phenomenological approach, philosophical-analytical and psychoanalytical approaches, philosophical-anthropological approach, postmodern discourse, cognitive science etc. Significant success in the understanding of human corporeality was achieved within the sociocultural approach, the representatives of which treat corporeality as a natural product of cultural development. The cultural-historical, informative-cultural and axiological approaches are found related to one another in the study of human corporeality due to their qualitative characteristics. The development of cognitive science, representing the unity of sciences, which work together on the research of a common object, i.e. human cognition, is recognized as a successful project. As the authors stated earlier (Bogdanova, Abrosimova, 2018, p. 5), in cognitivism the thesis that it is "impossible to comprehend the work of human mind and the cognitive functions of human intellect if the mind is treated apart from a person's corporal organization" is becoming commonplace.
Within these directions, corporeality is recognized as "the human body, transformed under the influence of social and cultural factors, possessing sociocultural meanings and senses and performing certain sociocultural functions" (Byhovskaya, 1997, p. 464).
Thus including the "physical man" into
the area of social life means the transition of his body from a biological to a sociocultural phenomenon. During such process of inclusion, the body "fits" into the social context and undergoes transformations to perform certain functions according to social and governmental demands.
Human body is exposed to intensive objective influences by society, as a result of which the natural body gradually "disappears", and instead of it the disciplined body appears, which is shaped through the creation of specific disciplining (disciplinary) areas, within which the former system of physical stimuli and reactions is replaced by new desires and intentions. Such disciplinary areas include family, school, religion, medicine and art, which, in the form of different models and recommendations, contribute to the appearance of the new formations of the body (Markov, 1997). Thus, the formation of a disciplined body is the practice of adapting one's body to society's anticipations and values.
There are a number of scientific papers, which discuss different aspects of body culture and formation. McKay, S. and Vertinsky, P. (2004) speak about "a common desire to shape and order the biological and social body as part of the modernistic project", H. Eichberg (in John Bale and Chris Philo, 2012), speaking about the formation of students' bodies in gymnasiums, points out the changes coursed by the industrial revolution and the necessity to create special environment for the body development.
A lot of scientists discuss a woman's disciplined body in different cultural and historical contexts. underlining the uniqueness of woman's body and the transformations it has undergone. Thus, Trethewey A. (1999) describes woman's professional disciplined body, Balsamo A. (1996) claims that in modern technocratic environment the body is still gendered as it has always been.
It is important to mention that the human body undergoes the most intensive influences in the educational sphere, which is quite explainable in terms of the functions of education as an essential social institution.
Strong traditions of researching the role and meaning of corporeality in the educational sphere have been formed in scientific literature. These are the works of foreign classics: G. Bataille, J. Baudrillard, P. Bourdieu, B. Waldenfels, M. Merleau-Ponty, J. L. Nancy, M. Foucault; the works of post-Soviet researchers: L. Gaznyuk, O. Gomilko, P. Gurev-ich, B. Markov, V. Podoroga, O. Shparaga.
Special significance belongs to the works of R. Birdwhistell, A. Frank, B. Turner and M. Featherstone, who laid the basis for building the sociological theory of the body and development of such branch discipline as "sociology of corporeality".
3. THE STUDENT'S BODY IN WESTERN SYSTEM OF EDUCATION: M. FOUCAULT'S HERITAGE
The following ideas by Paul-Michel Foucault make up the conceptual and methodological base of this research:
1. power influences an individual through his body by means of disciplining it;
2. the aim of the new type of power - the bio-power - is to control the life of a human body, which is treated as an essential source of creating the added value by way of increasing its productivity and efficiency with the help of disciplinary technologies;
3. school, hospital, caserne, factory -these disciplinary areas, though different in their purposes, are built according to the common principles: isolation, ranking, order, usefulness, penetrability.
Studying the genealogy of the forms of power, M. Foucault concludes that from the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century the old technologies of power gave way to the new ones due to the development of capitalistic industrial relations and formation of national states. While the former institutions of power were built according to the principle of direct oppression and personal violence, the "positive" power, also called the "bio-power" by M. Foucault, has other implementation scenarios. If power were only executed in the negative manner (the function of oppression), it would be fragile.
According to the new system of capitalistic industrial relations, which do not suggest any personal submission, the bio-power is aimed at governing the life as it is and it treats the human body as an essential source of creating added value by increasing its productivity and efficiency with the help of disciplinary technologies. As Foucalt, P. M. (1995, p. 26) stated: " The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. This subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology; it can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet
without involving violence; it may be calculated, organized, technically thought out; it may be subtle, make use neither of weapons nor of terror and yet remain of a physical order" .
M. Foucault distinguished six periods of western educational system, emphasizing that each one has its own method of supervising the student's personality (the topic of supervising a person within the system of education was studied by M. Foucault in his work "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison", originally 1975).
A special place in Foucault's historical-pedagogical retrospective belongs to the fifth period, called the "Transition period" (the 18th century), when government begins to position itself as the major booster of all transformations and initiatives in the educational sphere. In Foucault's opinion, this is the birth time of the "disciplinary society" and simultaneously the birth time of all controversies of modern western education. And, however paradoxical it may seem, despite the democratization of all the basics of social life, according to Foucault, the establishment of the new specific type of power with an absolutely different scale of control, called the "panoptic control", becomes the reverse side of establishing egalitarian political and economic structures, which realize human rights and freedoms.
The principle of the individual's usefulness and political controllability becomes the aim of education, which is patronized now not by the private initiative and local authorities, but special government structures. Power treats education not only as an institution of order maintenance, stability and assurance of citizens' political stability, but also as a mechanism for increasing the production force of society.
How to achieve this aim? It can be achieved with the specific organization of educational process, corresponding to the demands of the new type of society.
Isolation, ranking, order, usefulness and penetrability become the principles of educational process organization. M. Foucault defines these principles by a unified term of "disciplinary monotony", which represents strict alteration of the taught subjects, studied topics and questions, assessed by means of tests and exams, in the order of their increasing complexity. In this combination of obligatory alignments, every student gets a certain place in the system of school disciplinary area depending on his/her age, achievements and behavior. During the educational process,
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they constantly move within the school area, delimited by organized intervals. Economic and technical rationality can only be ensured by detailed rules, faultfinding inspections and control over students' smallest fragments of life. To govern the educational process more effectively, school area has to be isolated from other social areas and be well observable, or panoptic. Foucault writes about the import of penitentiary technique into the system of education: "The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penality of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activiry (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body ('incorrect' attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). At the same time, by way of punishment, a whole series of subtle procedures was used, from light physical punishment to minor deprivations and petty humiliations" (Foucalt, 1995. p. 178).
Such organization of educational process helps to monitor students' achievements, eliminate cheating, assess capabilities and characters, and make classifications and hi-erarchizations depending on the produced results. Discipline creates government-required bodies, which become, on the one hand, more useful and efficient economically and, on the other, more obedient in relation to power.
It is a well-known fact that the first thing a child is taught in school is rules of corporal behaviour: how to stand, how to sit, what seat to take, how to hold a pen for writing, what its inclination angle and pressure should be like etc. The prescribed behaviour is imposed on the student by means of repetition and revision, punishment and praise. Thus, from the very beginning of school studying, the student gets accustomed to corporal obedience and strict regulations, which occur much earlier than acquiring skills of independent and critical thinking.
For example, Albert Einstein confirms Foucault's conclusions as he recollects his school and gymnasium years: "The teachers at the elementary school seemed to be sergeants, and at the gymnasium - lieutenants". It was the barrack spirit and drills which stopped the prospective great scientist from graduating, and which made him leave Germany and choose more democratic Switzerland for studying. While Einstein surpassed his classmates in Mathematics and Physics, he could not bear Latin and Greek, the teaching of which reflected the barrack spirit of gymna-
sium powers in full. When he moved to Switzerland, once again he wrote about the excessive drill in Zurich Institute of Technology: "...to become good, one had to possess an ability to concentrate all the energy on fulfilling tasks and loving order, which is necessary for writing down lectures and then processing them further. Such traits of character, as I had to admit regrettably, were not inherent in me! In fact it is quite a miracle that modern methods of teaching have not yet strangled the sacred curiosity completely, as this tender plant needs, together with praise, first of all freedom - without freedom it would inevitably die" (Gureev, 2017, p. 24).
So what has changed in the modern system of education? Have they managed to implement the habitus of "invention, creation and freedom" into the whole system of education, according to Bourdieu's ideas? Have they managed to eliminate drill and barrack spirit?
4. THE CONSTRUCTION OF HUMAN CORPOREALITY IN MODERN SCHOOL
Criticizing the classical educational model, Bourdieu P. (1997) proclaims the new one and refers to the concept of "habitus", which he interprets much wider than the set of body skills. Speaking of his project for the transformation of classical education, he writes about the necessity to create habitus of "invention, creation and freedom", which will be possible if we incorporate such dispositions into our bodies, which are able to make a counterbalance to the natural tendencies and cultural routine. "We need to introduce new rationalism, the extended rationalism which is open to the things it studies and which realizes its limitations. .This rationalism of benevolence and freedom will give place to imagination, feelings and sensitivity, and therefore to art and practicality in all its shapes (that is why it has an unbreakable bond with democracy)" (Bourdieu, 1997: 126).
Everyone who has put their children to school must agree, that despite pedagogical tendencies as well as democratization and hu-manization processes, the obligatory attributes of modern school appear to be the same as they were before; modern school is an isolated from the outer world disciplinary area with strict hierarchy and differential system, corporal drill, statutory rules and regulations, where a certain place is prescribed to everybody in
this hierarchy. Every class and every student, depending on their academic performance, assiduity and behavior, take a certain place and constantly move from one grade to another.
A question arises if it is possible and necessary to change the current disciplinary school structure. It seems that in the present civilization situation it is impossible, because school fulfills the demand for a technocratic person.
Modern educational discourse is a part of technocratic discourse. The idea that modern world is constructed by technology and is subordinate to it, and that all the major problems of this world, including the ones which are caused by technology itself, can be solved by technical means becomes the basic precondition of technocratic discourse. Within technocratic discourse all the basic spheres of human activity such as science, engineering, sport, industry, education, institution of power and medicine are explained "technically". The categories describing the questions, connected to these spheres of human activity, represent rationality, specialty, normativity, seriality and pragmatism. As it is fairly said by Podoroga, V. A. (2005, p. 117): "Human body is now only an object. It is examined, dissected after death, taught, cured, trained, disciplined and forced to work - in one word it is given biological, anatomical, sociomorphic and cultural characteristics". Due to this fact the process of socialization, which every new generation goes through, cannot be spontaneous, but, on the contrary, it has to be regulated, standardized and rationalized. Every student has to be "described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc." (Foucalt, 1995. p. 191) according to aims and requirements of society.
With the development of social relations, the outer control is shifted to the inner control. It might seem that in modern society there are no strict prohibitions and canons, which regulate appearance, manners, clothes and so on. However, there are implicit communicative norms, which organize both the shape and the inner affects of the body. These days classroom management is aimed at improving students' everyday life (Dizdarevik, J. D., 2014), so the question whether it is necessary and possible to change the attitude to bodily restrictions and behavior is still acute.
5. CONCLUSIONS
Apparently, education is not only an intellectual process of passing cultural senses from one generation to another, but also a process of modelling a student's body according to social and governmental needs and demands. Increasing its production capabilities as well as nurturing loyalty and obedience are the purpose of the changes, which the student's body undergoes. School is an isolated from the outer world disciplinary area with strict hierarchy, statutes, differential systems and corporal drill.
In modern educational model the characteristics, described by Foucault as the characteristics of the 18th-century school, remain relevant as western educational strategy keeps on fulfilling the demand for a technocratic person.
Conflict of interests
Authors declare no conflict of interest.
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