"The More You Know"

By referencing Foucault, it seems Robins and Webster made available wider implications for their argument on how education (re)produces social class. By using Foucault’s relationship between knowledge and power (which for Foucault, are reciprocal and contingent upon one another, I believe) they actually turn the rhetoric surrounding the value of “knowledge” on it’s head.

Embodied in public service announcements we are all familiar with, knowledge, i.e. skills, is advertised as the ultimate in empowering solutions, a way to individualize one’s self and realize autonomy. Knowledge is power for the student.

By using Foucault, Robins and Webster, quite nicely, I think, flip this rhetoric, “making visible” the fact that knowledge is indeed power, but power over the subject – a disciplinary system shaped to reproduce social class, and thus, in the larger picture, maintain capital relations.

Knowledge is power in a more straightforward sense: knowledge of people’s practices, patterns, behaviors, etc. But one must also conceive of knowledge not as a collection tool but as a system – a system that naturalizes, sometimes explicitly and sometimes tacitly, capitalistic values, a system that categorizes people based on their perceived aptitude (the criteria of which are market-driven).