The erasure of habit : tracing the pedagogic body

While education involves much more than a set of habits, their formation is integral to learning. Within many Western countries, however, habit formation is no longer considered a pedagogic goal. Students may still acquire certain habits of learning as a function of schooling, but the process whereby teachers utilize a form of instruction designed to encourage the habituation of particular knowledge and skills in students now seems something of an anachronism. This article focuses on the erasure of habit in the teaching of writing within the New South Wales education system in Australia. A genealogy of the pedagogic body is undertaken through an examination of primary school syllabus documents. In tracing the body it is revealed that while habit formation was once a central pedagogic tenet, its influence has now waned. With a resultant change in pedagogy, the body has been reformed with new postures of learning framed by the progressivist disciplinarity of teaching.