New biological rationalities in education (original) (raw)

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

The relationship between biology and education has been one that is long-standing and always fraught with danger and possibility. In many Western democracies, yet not reducible to such, the discipline of biology has been a key part of educational research focused on learning, especially in the area of evolutionary psychology such as cognitive load theory (e.g. Paas, Van Gog, & Sweller, 2010). Conversely, academic biology has had a much more difficult relationship with sociological educational research dedicated to equality. From phrenology, to genetically deterministic accounts of aptitudes, skills and professional life, to beliefs in family transmission of intelligence and the quantification of an intelligence quotient, to the globalization of eugenic discourse, to the racialization of who can attend a school driven by White assessments of 'primitive' and 'Black' bodies as 'adolescent races', to the sexualization of morality, to the hunt for disability, whatever has been designated as 'bio' has already been critiqued for the ways in which it legitimates and authorizes particular prejudices and preferences for extant ontological hierarchies (Baker, 2002; Chitty, 2007). Across the early nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth and ongoing, much of the response to 'biology in education' has thus followed other disciplinary trends in arguing that what looks like biology is socially constructed, historically specific, unevenly operationalized and not universal. The first decades of the twenty-first century have, however, seen something else play out that is, perhaps, not entirely reducible to the preceding debates. Some of the notions that were disputed by the social constructivist move, for instance, are being reworked both within and outside the academy. Contemporary societies are constituted by and contend with new forms of, or claims made about, the potentialities of biological thinking (Carey, 2012; Doidge, 2007) that are connected to the period after the human genome was completely sequenced (Meloni, 2016). Fields such as epigenetics and neuroscience are part of the possibility that 'biological life can be purposely directed' (Mansfield & Guthman, 2015, p. 12, emphasis in the original). While these fields are generating new incitements to discourse that animate older divisions around the for/against mentality in regard to biology, in some cases claiming to inform and converge with education's purposes (Ritchie, Bates, Der, Starr, & Deary, 2013) and in others being perceived as old threats packaged in new, shiny technologies (Gillborn, 2016), there are other dimensions to the incitements and engagement that we believe are not reducible to or purely explicable by past-present-future spatializations or for/against mentalities. Something else is going on that is difficult to put the finger on; that generates reverberations, celebrations, repulsions, worries, concerns, excitement at new possibilities, joyful inventions, fears about