ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist and literary critic. He undertook specific studies of madness, health, crime, sexuality, knowledge and identity, but not of education – though there are references to education and the school throughout his work. The focus of Foucault's thinking about power is relationships, and more specifically on the ubiquitous and inescapable presence of power relations. Foucault identifies and analyses a fundamental shift in the exercise of institutional or state power, dating back as far as the 16th century. Foucault himself describes the process of critique as 'a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept rest'. The chapter ends with two cases of people working with Foucauldian concepts and ideas in early childhood education.
