Culturalizing Economy and Security: The Historical Co-Construction of Educational Pipelines and At-Risk Bodies in the United States

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

Abstract

Research deploys “education pipelines” to discuss both the need to retain underrepresented groups in STEM-related fields, and the need to curb the criminalization of particular groups of students. This paper, instead, collages images of the “leaky STEM pipeline” and the “school-to-prison pipeline”—usually treated as separate issues—to illustrate how the “educational pipeline” works as epistemic infrastructure (Murphy, 2017) that materializes the differential calculation of students’ present and future worth. The paper continues to historicize how this epistemic infrastructure was historically co-constructed with at-risk bodies to preempt and prepare for the socio-economic crisis that is anticipated nationally and globally.
The paper first analyzes how current U.S. schooling has functioned as an economic-qua-security infrastructure that intends to produce those who can defend the nation’s economy and territory (e.g., STEM professionals), and at the same time prevent and/or expel “unwanted threats” (e.g., students cited for minor behavioral infractions). Both STEM education (NAS, NAE, & IM, 2007; NRC, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013) and zero-tolerance policies in schools take up cultural imaginaries of particular “minds” and “bodies” to account for economy and security issues (Nguyen, 2016). They turn schools into a sorting machine that preserves “the problem-solvers” seen as improving and securing life, and drains “at-risk students” perceived as degrading and endangering life. Not only is life quantified by economic indicators and qualified by security discourses, but also “culture” is re-invented to produce an economized and securitized population responsibilized for both taking and controlling risks (Brown, 2006).
The paper’s second part examines how various “educational pipelines” were historically constructed within US educational war on poverty that targeted at the domestic “culturally deprived children” and people of “less developed countries” during the 1960s to the early 1970s. It finds that education research and policies borrowed the use of "pipeline" from engineering, supply management and military personnel management to optimize the behaviors of teachers and students (see in e.g., Monroe, 1966; Zymelman, 1968; Fawcett et al., 1974). By distributing systems approach developed in military-economic enterprise into domestic and international education reforms, it argues, mathematic technicians, engineers, and economists also self-referentially designed a pipeline of producing themselves as if it was inevitably required by the socio-economic development as well as military-ideological competition. Meanwhile, students who dropped out or unemployed were cast as the “wasted generation” that needed to be recycled (Coombs, 1968) or the trigger of US “national emergency” to enable new educational programs (see e.g., Schreiber, 1964; Riessman, 1962) as cultural weapon to combat the war on poverty.
This paper contributes to the cultural studies of curriculum by situating curriculum and schooling in social science articulations of “culture” that quantify and qualify life for an economic-qua-security project. Although the social scientific term “at-risk” did not become popular until the report “A Nation At Risk” published in 1983, given populations had been treated as independent albeit “deprived” and even “dangerous” to the whole world if not intervened “culturally” by the early 1970s.

Author

• Lei Zheng, Peking University