Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization: A Brief History from Antiquity to the Digital Era

Description

This book explores the formation of human capital in education, interrogating its social and ethical implications, and examining its role in generating policies and practices that govern curriculum studies as an academic field. Using an inquiry approach and offering an intellectual history of human capital theory through a genealogical methodology, the author begins by contextualizing the formation of the theory and explores its correlation with the history of imperialism. Tracing the concept of human capital from ancient slave societies to colonial empires, the book arrives at the modern formulations of the concept in education systems and explores its impact on curriculum and pedagogy in the digital age. Asking whether an approach that represented slaves, machines, animals, and property in its history is appropriate for forward-looking democratic societies, the author then uncovers crucial implications for educational equity and teacher development. Presenting a unique genealogy of schooling humans as economic resources and offering a descriptive and critical analysis of its impact on education as lived experience, the author excavates ideas and mentalities by which we think about modern schooling processes. This approach supports the intellectual development of teachers and offers a critical assessment of power-knowledge relations in curriculum studies. Discerning associations between the human capital theory of education and technological progress with implications for ethics in the digital age, it will be an outstanding resource for scholars and graduates working across comparative and international education, the history of education, curriculum studies, digital education, and curriculum theory. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Notes Bibliography Chapter 1: To rule with justice 1.1 The beginning of school and empire 1.2 Ancient imperialism 1.3 Socrates as a model 1.4 Ancient economics and education 1.5 Ancient slavery and pre-modern progress 1.6 Threshold Notes Bibliography Chapter 2: Humans as property 2.1 Monasticism and secular state 2.2 Thomas Aquinas: the church and the political community 2.3 William of Ockham: a right beyond the law 2.4 Tension in the late medieval state 2.5 John Locke: liberating property 2.6 Liberty after Locke 2.7 Constitutional (un)freedom Notes Bibliography Chapter 3: Human-God-Machine 3.1 The divine and the artificial life 3.2 Francis Bacon: revising nature 3.3 William Petty: valuing each head 3.4 Scepticism: the animal–machine economy 3.5 (A)political economy 3.6 Instrumentalizing nature Notes Bibliography Chapter 4: Utilitarianism and market divinity 4.1 Nature and justice 4.2 The benevolent market 4.3 Market reformed morality 4.4 Revising liberty: Bentham’s society 4.5 Bentham and education 4.6 Behavioural technology Notes Bibliography Chapter 5: Human capital theory 5.1 Labour and capital 5.2 Capital, desires, and education 5.3 Economists dreaming of education 5.4 Human capital and (ir)rationality 5.5 Human capital: contradictions Notes Bibliography Chapter 6: Understanding the present 6.1 Education reform and data politics 6.2 Datafication and de-localization 6.3 Reconsidering 6.4 Education vs. schooling human capital 6.5 Transgression Notes Bibliography Index