ABSTRACT
Familiar elements of education are explored in their political being and dynamic in this chapter. First, a description and analysis of the politics of classroom practice includes an account of the distribution of identities and the politics of language as structurally inherent to that taken-for-granted political space. The teacher-figure, an invention of modernity, is represented as the bearer of an ontopolitics (politics of being) that is fundamental to how the school works as a paradigm institution. The topography and the bureaucratic dimension of that institution are explored to indicate further aspects of the political context of education and its ubiquitous and invasive effects. How the institution produces subjects of a certain political mode in modern times is indicated, followed by an exploration of the politics of knowledge and how this gets enacted in and through the curriculum with its determinations of subjects and its normative stages of development.
