From Unhygienic Bodies to Health Care Burdens: Shifts in the Racialization of U.S. Science Education Reforms

• In Event: Economizing Life Through Educational Reforms: The Reconfiguration of Racialized Hierarchies and Differential Human Worth

Abstract

Recent reforms propose differentiating science education for marginalized groups by focusing on everyday health choices as a strategy to improve public health. This strategy is not entirely new. This paper explores disconcerting resemblances between current reforms to empower marginalized groups by fostering healthier decision-making, and past reforms to enlighten racialized and colonized groups by regulating their daily hygiene habits. Building on recent work on how public health reforms reassemble eugenics logics with new modes of neoliberal governmentality (e.g., Horton & Barker, 2009; Rail & Jette, 2015), the paper highlights a shift in how demographic groups are marked as needing distinct types of science instruction. Where past reforms drew on eugenics discourses to separate the select few from unhygienic racial stocks, today’s reforms couple equity discourses with statistical correlations to divide lives “worthy of investment” (i.e., future healthcare professionals) from those liable to “diminish the value of the whole” (Murphy, 2017, p. 136) (i.e., healthcare burdens).

Mainstream science education has garnered critique for privileging the training of STEM workers and prioritizing economic competitiveness over more humanistic goals of science education, such as improving everyday life and closing health disparities (e.g., Aikenhead, 2006; Basile & Lopez, 2015; DeBoer, 2013; Roth, 2014). What this dichotomy between neoliberalism and humanism tends to miss is how health imperatives have been a prime site for what Michelle Murphy (2017) calls the economization of life. Organized as an entangled history (Sobe, 2013), the paper traces how health imperatives became enmeshed in new epistemic infrastructures that have reshaped how science curricula operate as sites of racialization. The analysis draws on research journals, policy documents, and curricular materials from the 1920s and 2010s to compare the calculative practices and planning discourses deployed in U.S. science education reforms targeting the health of racialized groups.

The paper outlines key shifts in how practices of science pedagogy racialize some as potential scientists and others as ill-prepared, unhealthy citizens. A century ago, reforms drew on evolutionary theories to order racial stocks along a trajectory of hygienic citizenship. Today, reforms arrange demographic groups on scales of science achievement and health literacy that serve as benchmarks of readiness for different “economic futures” (Murphy, 2017). With the rise of data behaviorism (Rouvroy, 2012), race is no longer theorized as an evolutionary reality, but forwarded as a statistically useful indicator of science achievement gaps, underrepresentation in STEM careers, and health disparities. In the absence of causal arguments, this statistical triangulation projects “non-dominant racial groups” as a triple threat to the national economy, reauthorizing the stratification of science coursework as a preemptive strategy to avoid the economic burden of those populations becoming underachieving, underqualified, and unwell.

Examining shifts in the health imperative within science education directs attention to broader transformations in the methodologies and philosophies shaping curricular differentiation in the name of equity. The paper illustrates how the formulation of student diversity as the management of populational probabilities depoliticizes the unequal provision of educational (and health care) services, while generating and regulating new kinds of bio-Others.

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison