ABSTRACT
Schools and education systems are power-rich social institutions. Michel Foucault convincingly argues that power penetrates in far more numerous and subtle ways than earlier writers allowed; but resistance too can take subtle forms, with which teachers are only too familiar, and is well documented in the sociology of education literature. Resistance to power by whole societies, including those that are far less anarchistic than the Tsimihety, is widespread. The Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman provided a highly influential analysis of institutional power. An anarchist perspective on education and schooling is particularly sensitive to the distribution and exercise of power. In archaic society by contrast power could be very widely diffused, as, for example, in Madagascar where Peter J. Wilson and his wife spent several years in the 1960s in fieldwork among the Tsimihety, reported in Freedom by a Hair’s Breadth.
