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

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Biocapitalism, an economic model built on making new commodities from existing forms of life, has fundamentally changed how we understand the boundaries between nature/culture and human/nonhuman. This is the first book to examine its implications for education and how human capital understandings of education are co-evolving with biocapitalism.

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

5 out of 5

Michael Burnam-Fink – Apr 19, 2014

Biocapitalism and neoliberalism are complex and slippery concepts, and as scholars it behooves to use them in considered way, rather than as placeholders for "BAD WRONG STUFF." Education in the Age of Biocapitalism has at it's heart a decent critique of the modern educational reform movement: that in a quest for objective, data-driven, evidence-based metrics of learning, it is creating populations of high and low valued students which recreates a deeply unequal segregated school system. Unfortuna Biocapitalism and neoliberalism are complex and slippery concepts, and as scholars it behooves to use them in considered way, rather than as placeholders for "BAD WRONG STUFF." Education in the Age of Biocapitalism has at it's heart a decent critique of the modern educational reform movement: that in a quest for objective, data-driven, evidence-based metrics of learning, it is creating populations of high and low valued students which recreates a deeply unequal segregated school system. Unfortunately, this critique is lost under layers of Academic High Theory which renders this book completely incomprehensible to anybody without several years of graduate training. There are many interpretations of theory, but I'm still unclear as to why biocapitalism is used at all-it just seems to confuse the subject. There are gestures towards a new understanding of science literacy and using actor network theory in middle school science classes, but this original contribution is merely sketched at. And as someone who has done work on two of the specific chapter topics (GMO organism and ADHD), I can confidently say that Pierce's reading of the subjects is incomplete at best and seriously misleading at worst.
5 out of 5

Graham Slater –
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Erin DeHart –
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Ana Sol –
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Kristen –
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Jonna Higgins-Freese –
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Jeremy Smith –
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Mechanical Twerp –
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Vi –