The Culture of Redemption and the Administration of Freedom as Research

Abstract

This essay focuses on the systems of “reason” in the educational sciences. It examines today's image of the constructivist teacher and child who, from different ideological agendas, collaborate and “construct knowledge” in a decentralized system of education. This image, it is argued, is an effect of power. It functions historically as a governing practice that links political rationalities about progress to the construction of individual identities. Contemporary research inscribes a 19th-century premise that the purpose of research is the social administration of the subjects (and subjectivities). This administration embodies a redemptive culture that promises empowerment and emancipation, but the particular scaffolding of ideas functions to consolidate and conceal power relations as the educational sciences inscribe “action,” “practice,” and “the soul.”