Normality, performance and subjectivity in a school context: analysis based on governmentality

Abstract

This article reviews some elements that intervene in the conformation of the subjectivity of students within the Chilean school context. The objective, in this sense, is to outline some hypotheses about the impact of the normative level in the student’s profile when confronted with the dimension of school performance. For this purpose, the notion of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault is taken as a framework for analysis, which attends to the setting up of an administrative framework aimed at the sphere of the population in complement with the individual dimension. Based on the Chilean experience, the paper analyzes some dispositif of the daily school that act as field of regulation and administration of those behaviors that, due to their mismatch with the expectations of educational performance, become objects of pathologization, intervention, correction, and medicalization. This situation is produced under the umbrella of a regulatory framework based on principles of inclusion, non-discrimination and at the same time of modernization in its management mechanisms. Some of the preliminary results that contribute to this analysis are the place of psychometry and its relationship with the individual as a cell of analysis; and the relevance of ‘psy knowledge’, as a “clinical-therapeutic” enclave within the school framework.