ABSTRACT
The idea of empowerment in education is undoubtedly one of the main interests of critical and progressive educators. It is usually presented as promoting emancipation through education, but emancipation that comes rather from an individual and collective engagement than from an external ‘liberator’ (such as teachers, schools, education, or social system). It puts the emphasis on the internal, subjective roots of empowerment that distinguishes contemporary approach to the emancipatory potential of education from pedagogical ideas of Enlightenment and Modernity (Rousseau, Helvetius, Kant, Schiller), which tended to see emancipation as something that needs to be provided by someone already in power. In the paper I discuss the category of empowerment as it is seen and used in the field of critical pedagogy and philosophy of education (e.g. Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière). Then, in order to critically analyse this category, I refer to the Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian perspective: I discuss the post-Foucauldian concept of educationalisation (Dapaepe, Smeyers, Simon) seen as a manifestation of governmentality (Foucault, Dean, Miller, Rose)—the form of power that can be identified with the neoliberal technology of governing through freedom. Educationalisation describes the tendency to extend the pedagogical ideas, categories, and methods to the non-educational aspects of life, such as economy, politics, civil society, culture, or even personal life. Through the processes of educationalisation, originally non-pedagogical problems are being redefined and become educational issues. In the paper I indicate how the concept of educationalisation may be used to present the idea of empowerment as a concept of power rather than of emancipation.
