Government of the soul and genesis of the modern educational discourse (1879–1911)

Abstract

This article aims to illustrate that the modern educational project, discursively articulated until the end of the nineteenth century, owes much to the ethics that Christianity had earlier systematized, in the context of the disciplined dynamics brought by the Counter‐Reformation. A kind of pastoral power remained within the enlightenment‐humanist project, and we should discuss its deepening in modernity, a growing technological sophistication to respond, reiterating the same principles and seeking similar results, against a background of increasingly complex interactions due to its extreme massification. To better explain this thesis special attention is paid to the so‐called Compayré Moment (1879–1911), a historical phase in which an entire generation of Francophone pedagogues predominantly reflected on the epistemological status of the Sciences of Education and systematized an encyclopaedic knowledge based on an education and teaching with modern characteristics. Hence, the government of the soul or disciplinary training of the will of the pupil was at the core of reform proposals defended by this group of pedagogues.