The Failure of Foucauldian Urban Schooling: Abstraction, Panopticism and the Carceral City
by David W. Boles

The great French philosopher and self-aggrieved sociologist Michel Foucault echoes and haunts the idea of urban schooling via anecdotal analysis and desperate discourse in his classic work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). That book has been used as a template by some scholars for creating effective schooling systems in urban centers but the obverse terror revealed in Foucault’s research has been put into practice as a modern pedagogic methodology. The certain failure of the system Foucault described for the application of epistemological patterns creates an uncertain future for urban schools and the cities that house them....

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