Emerging Biological Rationalities for Policy: (Molecular) Biopolitics and the New Authorities in Education

Abstract

This chapters poses two interrelated questions: (1) What do we assume policy can do, when it is informed and constituted by biological rationalities of the postgenomic age and new biosocial governance?; and (2) what are the implications of new biological rationalities for the constitution of education policy, and its varied practices of use and analysis? The chapter provides an overview of education policy as a form of biopolitics, including the connection between education and eugenics. The chapter moves to a discussion of molecular biopolitics and illustrates how this field alters conceptions of education policy as a site of population management to an emerging site that focuses on dismantling and remaking of the ‘body’. In this sense, a new bio-edu-policy will continue to manage populations but it will now manage designed, enhanced and optimized populations in efforts to govern more efficiently. We conclude by speculating on what kinds of future policy subjects, and new forms of policy authority, are imagined and created by an education policy informed by new biological rationalities.