The Awful Truth:1 a microhistory of teacher stress atWestwood High

This paper is drawn from a recent microhistory of teacher stress, a genealogical inquiry that reveals the debilitating effects of a ‘game of truth’ called ‘economic rationalism’ on South Australian teachers during the last two decades of the twentieth century. It explores the everyday stresses of teaching through extracts from the teachers' oral history narratives, contemporary articles from the mass media and relevant policy statements from the period. Informed by the theories of Foucault, Weber, and the Annales,Footnote2 it juxtaposes particular historical discourses about ‘stress’ with ‘regimes of knowledge’ that were circulating in the world of education. Notes C/o 50 Hutt Street, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia. Email: vmunt@ozemail.com.au The Department of Education and Children's Services (DECS) was changed in the 1990s to The Department of Education, Training and Employment (DETE). In 2002, it was changed back to the DECS. The teachers involved in this study simply refer to it as ‘The Department’. A salute to documentary film‐maker Michael Moore and his television series The Awful Truth, in which personal stories were used to illustrate issues of political or social significance. The Annales movement (founded in 1929 with a journal of that name), heralded the writing of a new kind of history with problem‐orientated analysis, a history that embraced a whole new range of human activities and dealt with ideas, feelings and mentalities. A ‘game of truth’ is defined by Foucault as the ‘point of linkage of what one says and does, of the rules one prescribes to oneself and the reasons one ascribes, of projects and of evidences’ (Foucault, cited in Flynn, Citation1994, p. 30). Neoliberalism is represented here as a ‘way of doing things oriented towards objectives … a method of rationalizing the exercise of government … that obeys—and this is its specificity—the internal rule of maximum economy’ (Foucault, Citation1997, p. 74). This name and the given names of all teachers quoted are pseudonyms. A survey reported in the Medical Journal of Australia (2001) revealed that, of a sample of 1340 adolescents surveyed, 5% ‘had clinically significant depression’.