The Provocation of Plaiting Palm Leaves: Habermas, Foucault and Media Presentations of Education in Danish Television

This article demonstrates how an underlying knowledge of education is relied upon and reproduced in a number of television presentations of a specific education scheme in Denmark, the Free Youth Education scheme. Employing post-structuralist analysis of discourse, the media’s critical presentations of the education scheme are shown to draw upon and recreate a conception of education as a non-leisure preparation for work, which should focus on obtaining specific, factual and immediately ‘useful’ skills and knowledge, and as an ‘un-free’ activity that does not contribute to personal development. In a Habermasian approach, the analysed news features could be viewed as instances of a responsible public service media fulfilling its role as the warning system in a ‘context of discovery’. In contrast, the post-structuralist perspective reveals the particular mechanisms and implications of a power-knowledge constellation.