The political nature of education and political placements in the struggle of hegemony in education

Abstract

The modern political understanding defines politics only within the boundaries of a political society immanent to the state, such as parliament and political parties. Within the framework of this understanding, it is discussed whether education is included in the political field. In this direction, although formal education is planned under the control of political powers, they are trying to define it outside the political field and turn it into a unilateral hegemony device. As this limited definition of the political, the importance of civil society in politics began to increase, the political struggle first expanded to the field of hegemony between civil society structures such as Trade Unions, and then the borders of the political expanded from the field of the state to the entire social field, especially within the framework of Foucaultian biopolitics and understanding of power. As a matter of fact, Foucault draws attention to the emergence contingency of the power relation wherever there is a mode of subjectivity in a relationality while revealing himself in the subject, instead of positioning the power in the field of the state alone. Thus, wherever the power is, there is the opportunity for resistance to emerge and the boundaries of the political to expand (Foucault, 2016). In this framework, the expansion of the borders of the political sphere towards the social sphere destroyed the one-sided perception of the concept of hegemony under the control of the state or the ruling class, and with the influence of Gramsci (1999), the concept of counter-hegemony and the struggle for hegemony emerged. The field of education should be understood as a field of political struggle as it contains many political confrontations that conflict with each other, such as power, education trade unions, education policies, educational designs such as teachers, students and families. Thus, the field of education appears, on the one hand, in the structural political struggle between the political power and "Education Trade Unions", and on the other hand, as a field of hegemony that includes particular subject movements and political subject positions, such as students and teachers.