Techne to technology: A critical enquiry into education technology (Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva)

This study had two purposes. The first was to complement Michel Foucault's historical analytics with Julia Kristeva's semanalysis to develop a framework for deconstructing discourse. The second was to demonstrate the framework by deconstructing the notion of technology in public education in light of the American democratic ideal of freedom of speech.; Foucault's historical analytics has at its base genealogy and archeology of discourse. Genealogy is used to place the emergence of a concept in historical context. Archaeology, on the other hand, is used to examine the archive of a discourse in light of the culture and the conditions of the time period in which it is used. Foucault used both techniques to disclose discontinuities in the history of human thought which framed historical periods he called epistemes. Foucault identified two major discontinuities in Western culture, the first roughly half-way through the seventeenth century which characterized the dawn of what he called the “Classical Age” and the second at the beginning of the nineteenth century which marked the beginning of the Modern Age.; While Foucault developed the idea epistemes in historical analytics, Kristeva's analysis of language includes the notion of ideologemes which are woven together through intertextuality. Kristeva contends that ideologemes are much like the epistemes except that ideologemes are particular to individual disciplines such as economics, biology, or education. The discourse that constitutes a specific ideologeme affects the changes in the discourse of other ideologemes through the concept of intertextuality with the vernacular of one infiltrating others.; The application of Kristeva's concepts of ideologeme and intertextuality to technology advanced the notion that technology as an ideologeme has become transcendent. When a discipline becomes transcendent, it acquires power which can be positive or negative. The particular technology chosen for a deconstruction is Channel One, a news show broadcast via satellite communication to 40 percent of secondary school students in the United States. Freedom of thought is unbounded discourse. When discourse is bounded, it is antithetical to freedom of thought. In this study, Channel One was shown to impose a boundary on the freedom of speech as thought.