So we’re seeing isn’t just educational failure but the successful production of subjects who understand themselves primarily through their economic utility. The “lack of coding knowledge” becomes a personal failing requiring individual correction rather than a systemic issue of how knowledge, power, and bodies are organized in late capitalism.
The real question becomes: what kinds of subjects does our educational apparatus need to produce, and for what forms of social control? · The boot camp phenomenon is particularly interesting, it’s both a scam and sometimes not a scam. it promises to bypass traditional educational gatekeeping but actually creates new forms of surveillance and self-discipline. Students monitor their own “progress” through metrics, internalize the logic of constant skill upgrading, and become entrepreneurs of their own human capital. But like k-12 students, never learn how to think. Just how to do. · The STEM pipeline operates as a form of biopower, (a biological power apparatus for the single individual, where the power to produce forms one self), sorting populations into the “capable” and “incapable” through seemingly objective assessments that actually reproduce existing power relations. Those deemed “not STEM material” are subjected to different disciplinary regimes that shape them into different kinds of economic subjects, a mixture of class, and race, gender, intersected. · The “abstraction issue” is not about cognitive capacity, and like many aspects it was never about one’s smahts, but it’s about how educational institutions function as disciplinary apparatus that produce specific types of subjects. Our banking model doesn’t just fail to teach abstract thinking (Friere) it actively normalizes students into docile bodies who accept knowledge as something deposited into them rather than something they actively construct (foucualt)
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