ABSTRACT
Christian pastoralism is founded not in principles but in the practices of a spiritual discipline whose object is to create a kind of person capable of acting on principle. Similarly, the administrative state is founded not in the principle of raison d'etat but in arts of government that problematise political reality as a domain open to technical administration. The gallery and the playground were the architectural embodiment and 'secularisation' of Christian pastoral pedagogy. The fact that the prototypical form of educational 'government at a distance'—the pastoral school—had already appeared in a state (Prussia) and at a time (the seventeenth century) not known for liberal political thinking points us in a more appropriate direction. The modern school system consists of a pastoral pedagogy deployed by a bureaucratic apparatus of government. The ways in which individuals know the school system depend upon their place in the decision web and on the manner in which they negotiate its procedural pathways and intersections.
