Jeremy Bentham was on to Something

When I worked as an aid in a resource/special needs class room a couple years ago we had a problem, after lunch kids would not focus as well because of all the excitement of recess and none of the kids would focus on their work and get easily distracted by one another. The normal routine would be to bring them recess and each aid would give them a worksheet or a test with about five kids at a table. So we unwittingly created a panopticon for the kids. Each table was kidney shaped where I was in the position of the observer and what we did was create dividers out of bookends and paperboard to keep all the students separated from one another. This set up was just a scaled down version of Bentham’s panopticon.


Before and after implemented the panopticon the students were supposed to always focus just on their work this meant they were supposed to be faced down doing the work. Because of this, they usually never knew if they were actually being observed, and for the most part I would just sit there texting on my cell phone under the table. This shows perfectly how in this setting one does not need actually observe, but only needs to be under the impression of observation which worked with no trouble at all. However, this is not a perfect panopticon because it is not a truly unverifiable observation where the kids do have the ability to see if they are being observed. But, for the elementary school children they did not need that unverifiable observation because part of their role was to stay focused on the work and not look up at me. So, in this sense there was a kind of unverifiable observation, it just wasn’t structural but, part of the power relationship itself.


Foucault wrote, “Hence the major effect of the panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (201).” And this just as true for the kids I taught as well as inmates in prison. Each student began to work with no problems because the panopticon environment created separate individuals (201). Foucault wrote to this directly, “ if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time…(201)” All of this produced the “automatic function of power” where I didn’t have to constantly keep the kids on track, they sat down in their partitioned areas and did the work with little or no pressure by me.
Another way the panopticon was beneficial in classroom setting was that the structure made the power more economic and effective, just like the panopticon in prisons, where instead of having one teacher/guard per kid/ prisoner we were able to have one observer for a much larger population. The only other way of getting those same results as a panoptic setting was if we had one on one teaching where one teacher would express power over one child directly. But, in panoptic setting it creates the same dynamic, yet with just one teacher instead of many.