Emotional Education: Practices and Discourses of Subjectivation

Education, rather than anonymous, impersonal and monolithic, is a heterogeneous and overdetermined process in which the learner constructs him/herself from diverse processes of subjectivation. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the critical scope of the notion of subjectivation in light of the introduction of emotional education in the Chilean school context. We argue that it is not only a normative and external discourse (equivalent to a technology of power), but also an effective tool of self-control (technology of the self) that models the emotionality of students, committing them in a particular work on themselves. Thus, from a genealogical perspective, emotional education can be analyzed as an institutionalized and theoretically legitimized operationalization for the instauration of an established order, through the acquisition of certain competences useful not only for the subjects to sustain and adapt to this order, but also to reproduce it (optimism, resilience, tolerance to frustration, flexibility, among others). In conclusion, the importance of thinking education not as a concrete, rational operation, applied to a prefigured object (the learner), but as a complex articulated becoming, composed of different vectors, including the processes of subjectivation that occur within it, is emphasized. From this distinction, emotional education reveals its Janic aspect, being able to be found, on the one hand, at the service of the emancipation of the established order, aiming at the modern ideal of a reflective and sovereign citizen and, on the other hand, contributing precisely to the subjection and subjugation of the learners through certain practices materialized in the educational device.