This article sheds new light on the genesis and development of school supervision, and also on relations between teachers' milieu and inspectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the experiences from Galicia, a crown land of the Habsburg monarchy, existing in the years 1772-1918. Drawing on Michel Foucault's methodological proposal found in his treatise "Discipline and Punish," it is demonstrated that school inspectors were a state social control tool. However, on the other hand, school supervision structures had a state-forming character; the experiences of Galicia in organising school administration and exercising school supervision in its territory were used in Poland after independence was regained in 1918. The Galician experiences are contrasted with reports from other countries relevant to the same period, making them a subject-matter of discourse relevant to the historical role of school inspections.