Power/Knowledge for Education Theory Article

Imagine going to a restaurant with a multiple-page menu in an unfamiliar language. You ask the wait staff for assistance because it's your first time at the restaurant. The person proceeds to give suggestions based on the listings. The pasta dish sounds nice from the title and the restaurant employee describing the dish. You order your food. It comes out to your surprise. In front of you is a plate of raw vegetables and half-cooked pasta, not al dente. It does not look appealing, nor is it what you expected. You have yet to learn what the chef was thinking, nor do you understand if the sous chef was a part of making your dish. What was the recipe? Could a fire in the kitchen have prohibited the food from being fully prepared correctly?
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​This inadequately prepared vegetable pasta dish is the equivalent of reviewing Chia-Ling Wang's article "Power/Knowledge for Educational Theory: Stephen Ball and the Reception of Foucault." Not being a philosophy scholar nor having any knowledge of Foucault before reading the author's article, the intended audience for this article was those in the field of philosophy, not anyone researching educational theory in meaningful ways. In the beginning, the author describes two parts of the article: Stephen Ball's work and accepting Michel Foucault's concepts of power/knowledge into his own work and suggesting problems with the promotion of Foucault's theories. The second part was to take a different philosopher's work, like Gilles Deleuze, to refute Foucault's ideas of power and knowledge. Wang gave much thought to writing this journal article about educational theory from philosophers' points of view. However, it would be fair to say that anyone outside of the field of philosophy would need clarification, similar to the restaurant illustration. This article had ingredients that needed to be prepared as described. Second, areas in the article had unrecognizable ingredients, which left this reader going to additional sources to try to understand the thought patterns, organization, and specific things written to draw a conclusion about the article. 

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