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Using document analysis, this paper examines the historical emergence of the quantified child, revealing how the collection and use of data has become normalized through legitimizing discourses. First, following in the traditions of Foucault's genealogy and studies examining the sociology of numbers, this paper traces the evolution of data collection in a range of significant education policy documents. Second, a word count analysis was used to further substantiate the claim that data collection and use has been increasingly normalized through legitimizing discourses and routine actions in educational settings. These analyses provide evidence that the need to quantify educational practices has been justified over long periods of time through a variety of documents and that the extent to which data governs educators’ thoughts, discourses, and actions has dramatically increased during the past century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper takes as its subject the circulation of tolerance discourse within two pedagogical encounters in two Australian educational settings, and draws from the work of Wendy Brown on tolerance as a regulatory force. Brown argues that discourses of tolerance are produced within historical and cultural milieu that enable tolerance and aversion to exist simultaneously. This has significant implications for how we might come to understand the project of working towards a socially just educational system and the various struggles encountered within pedagogical sites. I also examine the pedagogical affects that are produced within different educational moments as we work to teach in or around difference and when we embody the Other in the classroom. I engage with how these experiences speak to the way in which tolerance as national ideal acts to both alleviate and circulate discourses of inequality such as sexism and homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the increasing interest of Swedish schools to construct, analyze, assess and control the individual progression and social integration of students using biographical registers. I argue that this tendency - involving biography as a form of governance - can be seen as a revision of early 20th-century biographical research by the Chicago School of Sociology. In this paper I consider the theoretical, methodological and political background of the Chicago work in order to compare it to the Swedish use of student biographies. Their current use involves a twofold subjectification of students - as "objects" of assessment and as "relays" for assessment. Finally, this subjectivity is understood in relation to international initiatives in education restructuring where new ways of governing - often labeled as progressive - impose social control, heighten individual responsibility and, not least, create new forms of social exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the symposium titled Educational Research and the Necessity of Theory." The papers in the symposium arose out of the concern that educational researchers in Great Britain have neglected, and continue to neglect, and even deliberately avoid, theory. There are two opposing groups when it comes to theory. There are those of found it scary and frightening and there are those who are excited by it and believes that "theory floated their boat." The author believes that theory is an essential aspect of educational research and other research in social sciences.