Smart Drugs: Public Pedagogies of Education, Labor, and the New Intelligence

• In Event: Rethinking Education, Labor, and Subjectivity

Abstract

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has seen massive increases in diagnosis with prescriptions for Adderall and Ritalin reaching unprecedented levels for children, university students, and professionals (Schwarz, 2013). Public discourse on both ADHD and the overprescription of medical solutions has seldom exceeded narrow questions about the individual health side effects of putting kids on uppers and the “fairness” of using performance enhancing drugs in educational competition. This paper contends that media representations of intelligence educate citizens to devalue contemplative and socially engaged thought and action and to devalue and distrust public life. Such representations of intelligence do so especially by fostering individualized and commodified forms of mental empowerment and education while framing out of consideration forms of collective knowledge making processes aimed at social and political engagement (Bauman, 2000).

In light of the contemporary struggle over the meaning and uses of intelligence, critical educators today must confront anew the legacy of positivist rationality -- an ideology of radical empiricism which was central to the fordist era of the “hidden curriculum” of schooling (Giroux, 1983). Today positivist rationality, characterized in schooling by the omnipresence of standardized testing and the standardization of curriculum, is used not to conceal the ways that schools reproduce social relationships for capital, as prior critics claimed, but rather to openly justify a capitalist rationale for every aspect of public schooling (Saltman, 2012). Particularly, the explicit justification of schooling for individual competition within capitalism and for national economic competition on a global stage involves claims about self control and social control through the use of pharmacological manipulation of mental states (Fraser, 2012). In the current context, cognitive enhancement drugs are promoted as a necessity for individuals to compete in positivist forms of education so as to compete economically. As students experience decontextualized knowledge in standardized curriculum and on tests as meaningless and boring, amphetamine drugs are being used to stimulate students physically so that they can concentrate. This paper takes issue with Bernard Stiegler’s widely read contemporary framing of this problem as a crisis of technology and generationally transmitted values. Instead I argue that pharmacologically stimulated interest in knowledge runs counter to the value that critical education places on learning being meaningful so as to become socially and individually transformative.

In this paper I first foreground the discussion of smart drugs and the politics of intelligence by revisiting the ways that critical pedagogy drew on the Frankfurt School for a critique of positivism. I then take up the new uses of positivism in the neoliberal context, discussing the shift in forms of social control from fordism to post-fordism and linking the rise of smart drugs to the formation of a dual society of professional class self managing entrepreneurial student subjects, on the one hand, and, on the other, working class students subject to greater and greater repression. I briefly discuss the Hollywood film Limitless to elaborate on the public pedagogies of intelligence and education and to contrast the new anti-critical pharma-positivism against the values of critical pedagogy.

Author

• Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth