Educational Life in the Value-Added Era: Reflections on Educational Biocaptial

• In Event: Death, Hope, and Educational Frankensteins: Biocapital and Domestic Thinkeries

Abstract

We argue in this paper that the enclosure of educational life, as necessary for capitalist development, is a crucial extractive practice to understand because it transforms all life into a market value while perpetuating an insane growth model without limits. Illich’s concept of shadow work helps us understand how industrialism and now biocapitalist industries facilitate the enclosure of more and more aspects of life. Specifically, value-added strategies, we suggest, deeply embed through education the “professionalization of the client” and hence the student by producing an understanding of self as an industrial ‘tool’ in need of continuous optimization through types of educational investment (Illich,1978 p.51).

Authors

• Clayton Todd Pierce, University of Utah

• Engin Atasay, University of Utah