The Seduction of Plasticity: Environmental Epigenetics and the New Biological Rationality for Education Policy

• In Event: The "New Eugenics" and Education

Abstract

Objectives
This paper proposes that the emerging field of environmental epigenetics can provide a new biological rationality for education policy; a rationality that it is argued may provide a new form of eugenicist thought to education policy.

Environmental epigenetics proposes, in contradistinction to genetic determinism, that genetic makeup is plastic and thus, rather than fully determined, is open to intervention. This means that the plasticity of socionatural life makes it open to environmental (including physical, social, behavioral factors) intervention ‘improvement’, even ‘optimization’, as befits an age in which competition serves as the core ethic, and in which notions of self-entrepreneurship encourage the responsibilising of those who do not win in the race to the top. This paper argues policy and epigenetics overlap as ‘systems of reason’ (Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2004), where policy is a form of (racial) biopolitics (Harney & Moten, 2013), and similarly epigenetics is premised on the idea that ‘biological life can be purposely directed’ (Mansfield & Guthman, 2015: 12).

Theoretical Framework
This paper is a policy problematization (Bacchi, 2012) that aims to analyze how thoughts and practices are materially and contradictorily produced in particular time-spaces. This approach is used to identify both what is enduring and novel about the connection between eugenics, epigenetics and policy.

Methods and Techniques of Inquiry
This is a conceptual paper congruent with work of ‘policy theorists’ who undertake forms of ‘intellectually-based social criticism’ (Simons, Olssen, & Peters, 2009). This paper works as a form of abductive reasoning (Brinkmann, 2014), where we are interested in identifying the connections between the developments and mutations in eugenics and broad trends in contemporary education policy, rather than in specific policy initiatives.

Results and Substantiated Conclusions
The paper argues that the promise of plasticity that underpins environmental epigenetics coincides with the agendas of policy makers in a range of areas (Bjorklund & Bering, 2000; Shonkoff, 2010). The search for predictive capacity is what underpins education policy, and it is the biological rationality for predictive intervention that offers ‘opportunities’ to deepen and extend education policies of streaming and ability tracking within marketized systems, that are part of neoliberal intensification of building better ‘human capital stock’ (OECD, 2011).

The paper identifies the fraught promise of epigenetics. Plasticity can provide a reinvigoration of non-deterministic biological underpinning for social justice – including the idea that there is a way of connecting biological traits to equality of opportunity (Loi, Del Savio, & Stupka, 2013) – this very idea of plasticity is also what makes it pernicious. Intervention and ‘improvement’ is premised on normalization, especially around race, and hence epigenetics has been identified as the science of new eugenics (Mansfield & Guthman, 2015)

Scientific and Scholarly Significance of the Study
Epigenetics is occurring alongside a continuation of the role of education policy in the new eugenics (Gillborn, 2010), and a re-emergence of biological underpinnings for race, including arguments that the social construction of race needs modifying due to new findings in the field of human genetics (Morning, 2014).

Authors

• Kalervo N. Gulson, University of New South Wales

• Matthew Clarke, University of New South Wales