Ball (2013), drawing on Foucault (e.g. 1977), contends that the creation of mass schooling in the modern liberal state, far from being a normative project of social mobility, inclusion and democracy, harmed the life chances of students and was designed to segment, classify and separate students. These separations have occurred through ability tracking and streaming, including gifted, talented and special education, curriculum choices and the politics of knowledge (e.g., Gillborn, 2008; Gulson, 2011; Lipman, 2004).  Recent developments in state schooling, especially in the UK with the introduction of ‘free schools’ and ‘academies’, but paralleled elsewhere (Musset, 2012), are extending the project of ability grouping and separation as forms of sectoral streaming in the name of choice.

What is proposed in this paper is that the capacity to separate and segregate within education – a capacity that has drawn on ideas of intelligence and ability and been closely connected to eugenics (Chitty, 2007) – is now matched by an extra-ordinary capacity to intervene into life, not merely during school, but before birth through epigenetics, offering the possibility of modelling educational pathways and ability tracking from conception. We are suggesting, following Ball, that we are seeing the continuation of eugenic ideas and that this is likely to be played out as a form of ability tracking in the womb

Epigenetics proposes, in a refrain of the nurture-nature contestation, that genetic makeup is plastic and thus, rather than fully determined, is open to intervention, in that ‘the plasticity of spatiotemporal, socionatural life makes it open to intervention and improvement, even ‘optimization’ (Mansfield & Guthman, 2015: 5). Yet, the promise of epigenetics for notions of social justice, is also what makes it pernicious, for any sort of intervention around ‘improvement’ is premised on normalization. Epigenetics is occurring alongside a re-emergence of focus on biological underpinnings for the separation of races – that is we are seeing a reterritorialization of race as a biological, undoing the seeming settlement of it as a social construct (see Morning, 2014).  In this sense, epigenetics offers ‘opportunities’ to deepen and extend education policies of streaming and ability tracking, that are part of neoliberal intensification of building better ‘human capital stock’ (OECD, 2011), through epigenetics’ focus on “making live”, including the improvement and optimization that occur through eliminating those biological differences deemed to threaten life (Mansfield & Guthman, 2015: 5). As such, Mansfield and Guthman (2015) propose that epigenetics appears to be ‘the science of new eugenics’ (p.5).

Theoretical framework

This paper utilises the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality (e.g., Lemke, 2011). As Davies (2014, pp. 8-9)has noted, ‘at a certain point, neoliberal discourse encounters moral questions which, at least in its more positivist manifestations, its is unable to understand or to answer’.  This paper proposes a cautionary tale about bioethics, neoliberalism and education, about the governance of life and death (Clough & Willse, 2011), and education’s role in this governance. As Peters (2014: 328) has noted, the ‘biopolitical model of human capital is then pointed to by the ensuing discussion about eugenics and about which sections of the population to invest in’. What epigenetics offers is the possibility of optimising life as an individualised choice – in which access is medicalised and commodified – through decisions made as part of responsibilisation under neoliberal governmentality (Rose, 1999).

Against this backdrop, the aim of the paper is:

-       to speculate on the possible connections between the emerging field of epigenetics as a form of biopolitics and thanato-politics – that is as politics of death – and education policy’s role in these processes as part of neoliberal governmentality.

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