ABSTRACT
The essential structure of the paradigm apparatus of education in modernity is described as ‘the politics of the panopticon’, drawing on Michel Foucault’s use of Jeremy Bentham’s model prison to describe the specific, increasingly subtle and extensive logic of surveillance enacted through education. Reference is made to the exemplary pioneer bureaucrat, Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, who epitomizes the new political world order of the schooled society he helped to initiate. Reference is also made to classic late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century images to illustrate this change in the political landscape. The newly envisioned apparatus is seen to enact its own political culture but also to effect a radical change in the culture it inhabits. The socially ameliorative aspirations of educationists are reconsidered in the light of the embedded governmental structures and practices of schooling (and beyond) that rank, order and define subjects in terms of collective norms of being. The political implications of this ‘great transformation’ are considered. Finally, educational spaces are examined in terms of a continuity of structure and features with other forms of containment.
