Education in the Age of Biocapitalism Optimizing Educational Life for a Flat World

by Pierce, Clayton

• ISBN13: 9781137027818
• ISBN10: 1137027819
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-01-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book is an in-depth examination of the growing alignment between powerful global bioindustries and education reform in the U.S. Utilizing a biopolitical methodology, the book focuses on how value-added measures and other neoliberal strategies embedded in policies such as 'race to the top' are involving schools in a project to manage and regulate educational life for competing in a new 'flat world'. Understanding the educational present, this work argues, requires individuals to consider what advanced industrialized nations across the globe are viewing as the future. Biocapitalist development in areas such as genetic engineering, drug therapies, and cellular cloning is the promissory future driving nations like the U.S. to out-compete and out-educate one another at any cost. This book assesses the implications for education in the biocapitalist era and points to alternative futures not based on such a vision of life and its productive potential.

Author Biography

Clayton Pierce is Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, Culture, & Society at the University of Utah. He is the co-editor of two volumes of the collected papers of Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation and Marxism, Revolution and Utopia. Pierce's work also appears in top educational journals, such as Educational Theory, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Cultural Studies of Science Education, and in a number of books. His research and work in schools and communities focuses on developing alternative theories and practices of learning and knowing to counteract dominant neoliberal approaches shaping education in the United States.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Biopolitics and Education: A Return to the Question of Life in SchoolsPART I: ORIGINS OF EDUCATIONAL BIOCAPITAL1. Learning to be Homo economicus on the Plantation: A Brief History of Human Capital Metrics 2. Schooling for Value-Added Life: The Making of Educational BiocapitalPART II: PROMISSORY FUTURE(S): LEARNING THE SCIENCE OF LIFE3. Engineering Promissory Future(s): Rethinking Scientific Literacy in the Era of Biocapitalism4. Learning about AquAdvantage® Salmon from an ANT: Actor Network Theory and Education in the Postgenomic EraPART III: GOVERNING STUDENTS FOR A FLAT WORLD AND ALTERNATIVES5. The Biomedicalization of Kids: Psychotropic Drugs and Biochemical Governing in High Stakes SchoolingEpilogue: Alternative Futures of Education: Exiting Education for Biocapital