Abstract
In an effort to recognize intelligibility in the transformations encouraged by the educational policies of recent years in Portuguese schools, this article draws on Foucault’s analysis of “governmentality” as a critical instrument for interpreting the changes taking place in Europe and, especially, in Portugal. Focusing mainly on processes rather than on outcomes, we return to Foucault’s course in the Collège de France – Sécurité, Territoire, Population – aiming at drawing a parallelism between the reformism of current educational policies, which are translated into a legislative corpus, and the economy of power specified by neoliberalism. From this point of view, it is argued that the new modes of governing schools, teachers and students are progressively aimed at achieving three closely interrelated goals, namely: the constitution of an educational milieu allowing for the circulation of people, goods and information; the normalization of behaviors by deploying standards; as well as the adherence to the political economy rationale in school work. It is through these goals that the process of school autonomy is increasingly becoming a key instrument of school governmentality, to the detriment of the direct process of state administration. The new semantic configuration, which follows this process centered on self-evaluation, strategic development and pedagogical innovation, aims to encourage schools to do hermeneutic work on themselves, using their autonomy to improve their performance in order to establish themselves as high-quality schools.
School; Governmentality; Milieu; Security; Safety; Normalization