To be one’s own confessor: educational guidance and governmentality

Educational guidance is often seen as something good and empowering for the individual. In the present article, such taken‐for‐granted ideas will be destabilised by analysing educational guidance as a practice in which confession operates as a technology that fosters and governs specific subjectivities. White papers produced by the Swedish Ministry of Education will be analysed drawing on Foucault’s concepts of technologies of the self and governmentality. I shall argue that the practice of educational guidance fosters our will to learn through the technology of confession. We are not only confessing ourselves to, and are the confessors of others, we are also our own confessors; that is, we confess our inner desires to ourselves, thus participating in shaping desirable subjectivities. Our desires in life coincide with the political ambition to govern, and thus we govern ourselves.