Philosophies
Ideas that influenced the generation of Jack Whitehead's living-educational-theory.
Foucault, M. (1977). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. (Ed C. Gordon. Translated by C. Gordon, L. Marschall, J. Mepham, K. Soper). New York: Pantheon Books.
I accept Foucault's (1977) distinction between the 'specific intellectual' as opposed to the 'universal intellectual'. He says that for a long period the 'left' intellectual was acknowledged as a champion of truth and justice. The intellectual was a spokesperson of the universal in the sense of moral, theoretical and political choices. In opposition to the universal intellectual, he describes the specific intellectual in terms of an engagement in a struggle at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them. Foucault takes care to emphasise that by 'truth' he does not mean 'the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted'. By 'truth', he means the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true. The struggles 'around truth' are not 'on behalf' of the truth, but about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays. (Page 81 in Whitehead, J. (1993) The Growth of Educational Knowledge; Bournemouth; Hyde)
