ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on governmentality studies and Foucauldian archaeology to present the key concepts and theoretical resources that are mobilised in the book to problematise educational evaluation as a key form of rationality in the governing of contemporary education. First, this chapter locates the book in the space of interrogation opened by the perspective of an analytics of government and approaches educational evaluation as a way of reasoning, thinking about, calculating and responding to the problem of the value of education and its subjects. Second, it explains how and why this book can be conceived as genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Specifically, this chapter illustrates in detail the distinctive traits of the archaeological method, its machinery, vantage points and limitations, when it is mobilised to carry on a historical ontology of ourselves as educational subjects.
