Education in the Age of Biocapitalism : Optimizing Educational Life for a Flat World
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2013
Number of pages: 211
ISBN-13: 9781137027825
Description: "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"--
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Biopolitics and Education: A Return to the Question of Life in Schools; title: PART I: ORIGINS OF EDUCATIONAL BIOCAPITAL; title: 1. Learning to be Homo economicus on the Plantation: A Brief History of Human Capital Metrics; title: 2. Schooling for Value-Added Life: The Making of Educational Biocapital; title: PART II: PROMISSORY FUTURE(S): LEARNING THE SCIENCE OF LIFE; title: 3. Engineering Promissory Future(s): Rethinking Scientific Literacy in the Era of Biocapitalism; title: 4. Learning about AquAdvantage® Salmon from an ANT: Actor Network Theory and Education in the Postgenomic Era; title: PART III: GOVERNING STUDENTS FOR A FLAT WORLD AND ALTERNATIVES; title: 5. The Biomedicalization of Kids: Psychotropic Drugs and Biochemical Governing in High Stakes Schooling; title: Epilogue: Alternative Futures of Education: Exiting Education for Biocapital