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Rewriting the responsible parent

Wayen S. McGowan (The University of Western Australia)

History of Education Review

ISSN: 0819-8691

Article publication date: 14 October 2006

177

Abstract

This paper is derived from a larger study that explored how the rationality of freedom became inscribed in educational practices that shaped and reshaped limits that constitute the responsible parent. Here, I draw on part of the study to diagnose how romantic discourse on childhood, which rewrote religious and secular discourse in the eighteenth century, was refashioned in the nineteenth century to rewrite the responsible parent. In this historical inquiry, I follow Foucault’s lead and analyse thoughts of freedom not as a value that we cannot live without or an illusion that hides the truth of our oppression but as a political tool for producing the ‘other’ as a means of inciting the autonomous parent to recognise the self as an ethical subject responsible for educating the child. What this exposes is how the writing and rewriting of the responsible parent in terms of educating the child within liberal government is reliant on fabricating ‘otherness’ as a threat to freedom.

Keywords

Citation

McGowan, W.S. (2006), "Rewriting the responsible parent", History of Education Review, Vol. 35 No. 2, pp. 45-49. https://doi.org/10.1108/08198691200600010

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2006, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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