The epistemic space of digital education governance. An archaeological perspective on data, automation and the promise of perfection

We assist nowadays to the intensification across scales, sites, and times of data-based and evidence-driven forms of governance and management in education. This is coupled with a more and more pervasive role played by digital technologies in education governance. In this chapter I mobilise Foucauldian archaeology to interrogate both the ontology and epistemology of the contemporary digital education governance, discussing epistemic tensions in the production of the ‘subjects’ and objects’ of governance. The analysis focuses on (dis)continuities in: a) how specific governing subjects and objects are recognised and treated; b) what authorities are assigned to hold and care for them and can decide about them, and according to what criteria; c) what methods are employed to make distinct type of operations on/with/through them. I argue that the epistemic space of digital education governance, rather than being a radically new space, presents multiple points of continuity with the episteme of modern education governance and notably: a) the ontological definition of the educational (both as subject and object) as a paradoxical figure of knowledge that is knowable and predictable; b) the ethical radicalization of the promise of perfection; and c) the epistemological centrality of datafication. At the same time, the chapter emphasizes automation and the aspirations towards automated management as a key point of epistemic discontinuity that tends to decenter the ‘modern human’ as the reflexive subject of educational governance and creates the conditions of possibility for the emergence of digital subjects as radically heterogeneous entities.