Foucault and Progressive Education

The "expert" phase of Progressive Education is dead, or at least dying. We have come to the end of the rope with regards to the idea that there are professionals out there who can and should do a better job at education than other, less professional folks. Well, there's a lot of double talk, but some of the more academic educators have figured this out even if the court system in California is a little behind. Instead of relying on the idea of a professional expert to show us all what we need to know to become Dewey's "knowledgeable citizens" the educators have shifted gears to Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Foucault was a French social theorist who taught that people learn through self-questioning and other-questioning, which eventually creates power. According to Foucault, "power and knowledge are joined together" because what we consider knowledge is created by those in power. The old "winners write the history books" argument comes into play here.
Foucault was a postmodern thinker who taught that in the realm of truth, there were "regimes of truth" generated by societies. Truth amounted to "the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true." Truth was, of course, relative, and was kept in place by those in power.
In Progressive education the standardized, testable, formal assessment is the only way to determine if anything is being done because the "experts" who wrote the curriculum are not present teaching the curriculum. The teacher is no longer the one who knows, but is instead a stand-in administrator for the all-knowing textbook. Foucault suggested that American education exercises a disciplinary role over children to the tune of a prison. “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” The challenge of Progressive education, in their own minds, is not to teach children anything, but to keep them where they are long enough so they don't leave. School systems regularly pass students from grade to grade, regardless of how they perform, because if students don't pass they will drop out. If a student drops out, the argument goes, the system has failed. So they keep the train moving regardless of the condition of those inside. So this aspect of Progressive education is dying because educators are figuring out that the plethora of tests and administrative controls actually devalue the teaching role. One author has asserted that "standardizing procedures and developing competency tests may actually create more problems than they solve."
So what is the pedagocial answer? Foucault argues that to have power, everyone must accept responsibility for knowledge. The teacher must hand over the seat of authority and become a student in the same idiotic state as the student. Both sit there sharing statements, responses, questions, and replies to enhance or argue the last reply indefinitely. "For Foucault, through these discourses or complex crisscross of thoughts and the social forces that support them, individuals come to know what is true about the world. Drawing on these created truths, they organize and control their lives." (Levitt, 47).
Levitt argues, "To encourage students to critically consider and even challenge their learning, teachers must develop their own self-images as knowledgeable individuals, interacting and learning with others. Educators’ contributions to this discourse are particularly important, as they have as much to offer as to gain."
Modern education is scary folks.