Michel Foucault sought to understand how and why it is that people in the West, in their arduous and incessant search for truth, have also built into and around themselves intricate and powerful systems intended to manage all that they know and do. While little of Foucault's work directly concerns itself with the historically recent phenomenon of mass-based, school-centred, state-sponsored education, it is argued in this article that it is both possible and useful to distil from Foucault's "oeuvre" an account of the centrality of the pedagogical relationship to the rise of western political rationalities, from ancient times to the present. This account, of the historical interweaving of "relations of discourse, of power, of everyday life and of truth", not only revises the manner in which one might understand the past; it also sheds light on issues of contemporary educational significance. A significant finding of Foucault's work is that the processes whereby some people discipline or govern others are frequently closely connected to procedures of identity-constitution or self-discipline. In this article, the author talks about Michel Foucault's views of truth, power and pedagogy on the rise of the disciplines.