O sujeito na crítica foucaultiana à educação na obra “Vigiar e Punir”

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze Michel Foucault's arguments regarding his critique of the idea of education, focusing on the subject as presented in his book Discipline and Punish. Considering a post-Enlightenment and post-Industrial Revolution society, the subject, already seen as the center of everything in the 18th century, continues to be central to society. However, in Foucault's view, this subject can be seen as a passive point within various layers of discourses and practices, which the author calls "apparatus." These practices and discourses involving the subject, such as rules, ideologies, and policies, create relationships between knowledge and power. These relationships of knowledge and power are interdependent, causing the subject's subjugation in various fields of knowledge. Education as a form of knowledge, like prisons, hospitals, and the army, after the industrial revolution adopted this disciplinary model of control, in which the subject is molded for production. This work will analyze this Foucauldian critique in comparison with ideal pedagogies written in the 18th century, such as those of Immanuel Kant, as a way of fitting the subject as subjugated and as "naturally there," as present in Enlightenment philosophies.