Education in the Age of Biocapitalism: Optimizing Educational Life for a Flat World (New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics)

As an economic model built on finding and creating new commodities from existing forms of life, biocapitalism has fundamentally changed how we understand the boundaries between nature and culture and thus relations between humans and nonhumans. How, for example, should educators, students, and communities respond to developments such as the first genetically engineered animal made for human consumption, powerful new psychotropic drugs designed to target behavioral 'disorders' in students, genetic explanations of learning and intelligence, and new methods of educational assessment interested in determining the added value of students and teachers in the classroom? Education in the Age of Biocapitalism is the first book to not only chart how education should respond to the historic challenges of living in a biocapitalist society but also to examine how human-capital understandings of education have merged with the productive paradigm of biocapitalism interested in extracting the most value out of life.