Scripted Bodies
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Scripted Bodies

Corporate Power, Smart Technologies, and the Undoing of Public Education

Kenneth J. Saltman

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eBook - ePub

Scripted Bodies

Corporate Power, Smart Technologies, and the Undoing of Public Education

Kenneth J. Saltman

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About This Book

From drugging kids into attention and reviving behaviorism to biometric measurements of teaching and learning Scripted Bodies exposes a brave new world of education in the age of repression. Scripted Bodies examines howcorporeal control has expanded in education, how it impacts the mind and thinking, and the ways that new technologies are integral to the expansion of control.

Scripted Bodies contends that this rise in repression must be understood in relation to the broader economic, political, and cultural forces that have produced an increasingly authoritarian society. This book details how these new forms of corporeal control shut down the possibility of public schools developing as places where thinking becomes the organizing principle needed to contribute to a more equal, just, and democratic society.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317199328

1
Smart Drugs

Corporate Profit and Corporeal Control
ADHD, which has seen massive recent increases in diagnosis since 2000, is defined as a difficulty in paying attention, restlessness, and hyperactivity. By 2010, nearly one in three US children aged 2–17 had been diagnosed as suffering ADHD,1 and by 2012 the diagnoses of ADHD had risen 66 percent in the prior decade.2 Ballooning rates of diagnosis have been met with unprecedented levels of medical prescriptions, principally for the amphetamine pharmaceutical drugs Adderall and Ritalin. By 2011, 11 percent of all US children aged 4–17 were diagnosed with ADHD and 6.1 percent were taking ADHD drugs, and an estimated 8 to 35 percent of university students in the United States were using cognitive stimulants.3 Boys are diagnosed at nearly three times the rate of girls.4 About 80 percent of those children diagnosed with ADHD are using these medications.5 Children below the poverty line are diagnosed at higher rates, especially poor toddlers.6
Some scientific literature claims that ADHD results from underdevelopment of parts of the brain responsible for executive function, that is, the parts of the brain responsible for self-control.7 Doctors and psychologists use the US-based psychological diagnosis manual DSM-IV to diagnose ADHD 3–4 times more frequently than their European counterparts do with the ICD-10.8 Spectacular increases in diagnosis and radically disparate rates of diagnosis lend empirical weight to cultural theories of ADHD that suggest the disorder is principally a social construct rather than a biologically based medical pathology.
As a social construct, ADHD diagnosis participates in producing and regulating social norms, drawing the boundaries for the normal and abnormal, and contributing to broader discourses about intelligence, education, and social opportunity. Usually ADHD diagnosis begins with teachers suggesting the possibility to parents. A student is restless in class, bored by lessons, and finds paying attention and sitting still excruciating. As a social construct, ADHD belies shifting social and educational values. In an era of neoliberal educational restructuring, youth are expected to display corporeal discipline, docility, and a willingness to endure lessons that are increasingly standardized, scripted, and removed from individual and social meaning. The student in the instrumentalized, hyper-rationalized, and vocational era of neoliberal education is required to become a disciplined consumer of commodified knowledge. Proper self-discipline in the name of producing “college and career readiness” increasingly brings together the imperative for students to use the tools of bodily control to be entrepreneurial “subjects of capacity.”9 That is, proper attention is demanded of students to display test-based performance outcomes that allow the student to compete for shrinking access to the world of work, income, and commodity consumption.

Smart Drugs and the Pursuit of Profit

The steady expansion of ADHD diagnosis and cognitive stimulant prescription has been driven by the profit-seeking educational projects of the pharmaceutical industry.10 The US-based industry targets parents, teachers, and doctors with drug advertisements and educational materials that encourage diagnosis and prescription. These educative projects have succeeded. In 2010, Americans spent US$7 billion on ADHD drugs.11 By 2015, the amount spent had risen to US$12.9 billion.12 Clayton Pierce’s biopolitical analysis emphasizes another economic dimension that he terms “extractive schooling.” This refers to the ways that drugging students participates in neoliberal governmentality in which alleged educational and ultimately economic value can be extracted from the labor of teachers and students in conjunction with other neoliberal educational restructuring initiatives, such as value added assessment and high stakes standardized testing.
Based on an industrial efficiency model of knowledge transmission, high stakes standardized tests undermined the historical efforts of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to use federal funds progressively to support schools and districts in poverty. Instead, high stakes testing punishes schools with low test scores and rewards schools with high scores, thereby exacerbating educational resource inequality by affirming the connection between the wealth of classes and the cultural capital that the tests affirm or punish.13 In the era of neoliberal “accountability,” “smart drugs” are used as a tool to raise test scores for teachers subject to value added assessment whose job security and income are now linked to test scores.14 Likewise, in schools and districts in need of financial support and with low, stagnant, or declining test scores, smart drugs offer a means to game the regressive federal system.
The radical rise in ADHD diagnoses by two thirds over the first decade of the millennium coincided with the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind law that centered on high stakes standardized testing. The “high stakes” part of the high stakes testing puts economic sanctions on low test scores and rewards high test scores. As Maggie Koerth-Baker has observed, “when a state passed laws punishing or rewarding schools for their standardized–test scores, ADHD diagnoses in that state would increase not long afterward. Nationwide, the rates of ADHD diagnosis increased by 22 percent in the first four years after No Child Left Behind was implemented.”15 Studies that break down ADHD diagnosis by state confirm that the states with the greatest financial penalties under No Child Left Behind are also the states with the greatest rates of diagnosis, especially for youth below the poverty line.16
The neoliberal imperatives for testing, scripted lessons, and direct instruction for “higher outputs” have created institutional conditions and financial rewards and punishments so that ADHD symptoms of restlessness, inattentiveness, and hyperactivity have become more prevalent, numerous, and more likely to be identified. That is, the new culture of control in schools is inseparable from the trend for the radical rise in the medical pathologization of students. Reasonable individual responses (like restlessness) to repressive institutional conditions—like disassociation from the environment, extreme boredom, and inability to find relevance in the assignment—have become the basis for the identification of disease and the prescription of drugs. Moreover, the medical pathologizing of students is interwoven with neoliberal ideology in education in which knowledge, learning, and intelligence are understood through the register of economic competition, social mobility, and opportunity. “From parents’ and teachers’ perspectives, the diagnosis is considered a success if the medication improves kids’ ability to perform on tests and calms them down enough so that they’re not a distraction to others.”17 As well, the high stakes testing and drugging of students facilitates the expansion of the multi-billion dollar test and textbook publishing industry, and creates profits for the medico-pharmaceutical industry. In conjunction with privatization, such as expanded chartering and its deunionizing effects, value added assessment and high stakes testing regimens participate in creating a disposable workforce of teachers who can be hired cheaply, burned out, and fired. This assures lower quality of teaching and it results in less spending on universally beneficial public goods and services.
The linkage of “smart drugs” to the precaritization of teacher work must be understood in relation to the post–2008 austerity politics that continues to promote the neoliberal pillage of the caregiving roles of the state, public schools, teacher pay, public worker jobs and pensions—all under attack as wasteful rather than as a public investment. While one might call this process “value extraction” (as Pierce does) or the disciplining of teacher work, in reality it destroys value in the process of teaching by gutting teaching experience and teacher autonomy, and displacing meaningful teaching and learning.18 Such a trend is inextricably linked to the struggle by different classes for the use of public tax dollars to expand private control and benefit, such as school privatizations, public resource extraction and forms of education designed to make a disciplined and docile labor force or to use public tax dollars to expand public, democratic, and civic control and benefit such as the investment in public schools and the fostering of critical pedagogies that can foster a broad based struggle of democratic social relationships throughout public and private institutions. The nexus between pharmaceutical control of kids’ attention and the steady expansion of standardized testing and standardization of curriculum transforms the social and individual value of knowledge while also undermining critical pedagogies and efforts to develop in students a critical consciousness for engaged social intervention. While the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 allows states to reduce the number of standardized tests promoted under No Child Left Behind, it maintains the requirement for standardized testing, ties state funding for teacher and leader preparation to student test scores, and comes following the federally promoted installation of a massive state-based infrastructure in testing and standardization.19

Smart Drugs and the Politics of Knowledge

The turn to standardized testing and to the use of “smart drugs” to increase scores is based in positivist ideology in which tested knowledge is decontextualized from the experiences of students and teachers, and delinked from its broader social significance. Positivist ideology treats knowledge as a collection of facts that are disconnected from matters of interpretation, as well as from the interests, social positions, and values of those who promote particular interpretations and claims to truth.20 The testing trend focuses educational practice on so-called outcomes rather than on educational process. It embraces a transmissional model of pedagogy and curriculum in which knowledge is likened to units of commodity to be delivered, consumed, and regurgitated back on the test. Such an assumption shuts down debate, dialogue, curiosity, and creativity while making efficacy of delivery the primary focus of teaching and learning. There is clear evidence that the trends of No Child Left Behind with its outputs-based view of knowledge and tendency to shut down interpretation, debate, and creativity are experienced by students as boring and meaningless.21
There is a concealed politics to the positivism promoted in standardized testing. The tests obscure the interests and social power of those claiming the importance of particular knowledge while false neutrality and objectivity are promoted and assisted through the seemingly natural scientific reality of numbers. The denial of how knowledge relates to social and individual values, interests, ideologies, and experiences renders knowledge meaningful only for its abstract institutional capacity to be like economic currency or points in a game. Knowledge in this approach to teaching and learning is alienated from the social world and yet repurposed to become meaningful only for what it can gain the learner in a system of extrinsic rewards (such as grades or points) and eventually jobs, cash, and consumer goods. Put differently, what grounds the universalism of knowledge is neither its meaning to students’ lives nor its meaning in the social world. The alleged universal value of knowledge on standardized tests is grounded by its abstract exchange value as currency, first in educational settings and then in economic markets. Indeed, as Theodor Adorno pointed out, the very allure of positivism is its promise of certainty and its propensity to value only that which can be numerically quantified. In this view of the social world, everything is for sale—that is, has value only for its market exchangeability.22 Everything appears as exchange value and hence abstract. Numbers and the positivist display of quantification, Adorno points out, promise a false solidity and certainty in a world in which all things solid melt into air.
Currently, 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 and memorize knowledge for tests. Smart drugs stimulate an artificial capacity to endure meaningless learning of decontextualized knowledge that is de-linked from students’ prior experience and from the social world. The value of “stim knowledge” is its abstract exchangeability on the academic market. That is, decontextualized knowledge is recontextualized through its association as a knowledge currency, voided of its social importance other than as something with potential economic value.
Pharmacologically stimulated interest runs counter to the value that critical education places on learning that is meaningful so as to become socially and individually transformative. Put another way, drugging kids for standardized tests displaces social and political agency, the use of knowledge for students to comprehend, act on, and shape the social world they inhabit, fostering instead consumer agency in which knowledge can only be seen in terms of its exchange value for additional educational promotion but ultimately for the capacity to get money.
Smart drugs promise intelligence, but, in fact, by being promoted in conjunction with standardized testing and the standardization of curriculum, they foster ways of thinking that devalue some of the most crucial questions of knowledge and curriculum. It is crucial to emphasize that cognitive enhancers are tools. I am criticizing the use of these tools in school as compensatory for an approach to schooling that devalues thinking and abstracts knowledge from the self and society. That is, smart drugs are used to promote efficacious consumption of knowledge in place of questions that ought to be interwoven with the process of schooling such as: What values and assumptions undergird claims to truth? What are the social positions, class and cultural interests represented by knowledge and the kinds of questions that are asked? The dominant educational reforms share the same framing assumptions about knowledge as the smart drug trend.

Educational Reforms

The Common Core State Standards, the rec...

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