Pedagogical power Lessons from school spaces

While accounts of the so-called ‘Totally Pedagogised Society’ (Bonal and Rambla) or ‘Public Pedagogy’ (Giroux) have been important to our conceptions of civil society, democracy and education, lessons can be drawn from schooling which complicate this story and undermine any simple division between the state, civil society and non-governmental organizations, in relation to both formal education and the broader narratives of radical or critical pedagogy. This article develops an account of pedagogical power which values the inciting and enabling practices of pedagogy as the art of teaching. It then considers pedagogical forms of power both within formal state schooling in the UK and the pedagogical strategies employed by non-governmental organizations within and outside of the formal educational sphere – arguing that the latter does not automatically promote values of social justice and democracy.