Why we must never become classroom managers

Abstract

This chapter offers a genealogical account of the issues surrounding ‘classroom management’ as manifest in schools, the Education and Training sector and in Teacher Education departments. Genealogy here is one of Foucault’s methodological ‘weapons’ for flushing out assumptions; claims about what is right and what is wrong and judgments based on second order political positions. It does not believe that history is going somewhere or indeed has come from anywhere, but it does seek to identify the contingent events which may have prompted one course of action over other possibilities (Kendall & Wickham 1999: 29-31). In 2014 Ofsted published a report, Low-level disruption in classrooms: below the radar which underlined the degree to which a neo-liberal and at the same time retrogressive agenda had gripped English education. This ‘survey report looking into the nature and extent of low-level disruptive behaviour in primary and secondary schools in England’ was widely reported with the headlines suggesting that ‘pupils are potentially losing up to an hour of learning each day in English schools because of this kind of disruption in classrooms’ (Ofsted 2014: 5).