Epilogue

Abstract

This book has been an attempt to understand and map the colliding enterprises of education and biocapitalism. Biocapitalism in its broadest sense, as I have tried to capture the aspects of in each chapter, is a model of political economy that has further opened earth’s biology (both human and nonhuman) through technoscientific advances to the dynamics of a rapidly expanding free-market capitalism. Without the discovery of rDNA and the largest industrial agricultural system in the world, for example, genetically engineered food would not be one of the fastest growing areas of the industrial food economy. If education in the United States has been enlisted in the project of biocapitalist development (both as a productive and a consumptive population) where do we begin to look for educational alternatives? In other words, in learning contexts that increasingly look like the GMO cornfield that is managed at the molecular level, where do we start identifying both practical and theoretical points of departures from biocapitalist modes of education?

The ability, however, not only to live in new ways, but to insist on this freedom demands that we clearly recognize what distinguishes the perception of homo economicus from all other human beings.

—Ivan Illich