Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

larger system of education having evolved as a result of political and
economic forces.
Lastly, on the discourse-related theories, I comment on the work
of Foucault and introduce Habermasian theory as a counter-argument.
Foucault ushered in a radical way of thinking about intellectual
history and fields of study from a postmodern and poststructuralist
perspective. His postmodernist stance reflects an incredulity towards
Enlightenment meta-narratives, and emphasizes instead the plurality of
reason and of difference. Furthermore, his poststructuralist perspective
emphasizes a critical intellectual history, challenging the scientism of
the human sciences and foundationalist discourses. In this context,
the legitimation of knowledge becomes an issue. Who decides what is
‘true’ or ‘scientific’? Foucault argues that discourse is an all-embracing
constitutive and shaping force that is external to and constitutive of
knowledge and academic fields, that discourse is power-laden, and
that it regulates, legitimates and delimits knowledge. To illustrate
its application, Game & Metcalfe (1996), for example, discussing the
discipline of sociology, argue that it does not exist as an objective fact,
but that its boundaries are constituted through the discursive practices
of sociologists. Foucault’s early work, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972),
was about the history of concepts viewed from a critical perspective. It
examines the ways in which discourses and disciplines changed over
time, how it was that particular statements and discourses and not
others arose in particular contexts, and the relations between particular
discourses, such as “their coexistence, their succession, their mutual
functioning, their reciprocal determination and their independent or
correlative transformation” (Foucault, 1972, p.29). His later ‘genealogical’
works, e.g. Discipline and Punish (1977), in turn analyze the
relations of power that imbue and inscribe discourses and discursive
formations, and trace the ensemble of historical contingencies that
make up the ancestry of one or other currently accepted theory in the
human sciences (“Foucault” in Encyclopedia Britannica online). Foucault’
s genealogies study the histories of institutions and practices, not in
terms of a grand narrative of inevitable progress but from a congeries of
contingent ‘petty causes’ (Gutting, 1994, p.14).
As can be observed, Foucault tends towards the subjectivist and
relativist epistemological stance. Habermas’ debate with Foucault
on this issue offers a counter-argument in favour of a transcendental
reason. His theory of the ‘knowledge-constitutive interests’ (Habermas,
1978) argues that the ‘cognitive interests’ or ‘knowledge-constitutive
interests’ – the technical, practical, and emancipatory – shape and
determine what counts as the objects and types of knowledge in the
three types of sciences (empirical, historical, and critical social sciences).
These ‘cognitive interests’ are in turn anthropologically founded in the
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