Critical Directions in Education, Technology, and Politics – Serie

With this book, Keneth J. Saltman argues that drugs are at the center of the most significant transformations of schooling. Children are increasingly being drugged to compete on standardized tests, to increase their attention levels in school, and are being diagnosed with ADHD at exponentially increasing rates. Saltman describes the material stakes in what he calls the education drugs attention complex, namely: educational profiteering through the mutually supportive sales of drugs and testing products; drugs and digital screen technologies; drugs and trauma/resilience programs; and drugs and the school to prison pipeline. He shows how each of these examples are part of a vast interlocking drug and attention industry in which pharma and tech companies are commercializing and producing youth problems for profit and are targeting the most vulnerable young people. The book covers the prevalence of screen addiction, the misuse of hormone therapies for transgenders youth, anxiety and trauma medication, the connection between race and drugs, and in the final chapter offers critical, democratic, and practical solutions for educators and policy makers to tackle these issues.

With this book, Keneth J. Saltman argues that drugs are at the center of the most significant transformations of schooling. Children are increasingly being drugged to compete on standardized tests, to increase their attention levels in school, and are being diagnosed with ADHD at exponentially increasing rates. Saltman describes the material stakes in what he calls the education drugs attention complex, namely: educational profiteering through the mutually supportive sales of drugs and testing products; drugs and digital screen technologies; drugs and trauma/resilience programs; and drugs and the school to prison pipeline. He shows how each of these examples are part of a vast interlocking drug and attention industry in which pharma and tech companies are commercializing and producing youth problems for profit and are targeting the most vulnerable young people. The book covers the prevalence of screen addiction, the misuse of hormone therapies for transgenders youth, anxiety and trauma medication, the connection between race and drugs, and in the final chapter offers critical, democratic, and practical solutions for educators and policy makers to tackle these issues.

This book examines the entanglement of capitalism, technological acceleration and AI, and warns that they are eroding education as a means of collective intelligence. Alexander J. Means shows how our desires, dreams, emotions, and psychic life have become the target of optimizing drives and algorithmic manipulation aimed at extracting value from thought and time. He argues that this is leading to a disintegration of meaning, knowledge, and culture, allowing Fascism, fraud, racism, ecocide, and war to thrive in an environment of systemic nihilism and the collapse of memory into computation. He examines how education has become a brand word and how education is being reduced to training in compliance and suggests ways to stop this trend. Means draws on a range of theorists book including Franco Berardi, Alain Badiou, Byung-Hul Chan, Fredric Jameson and Achille Mbembe. The book represents a warning against a life of fundamentalism, money, consumption, and power and argues that education should, in contradiction to the current trends, be equipping young people and adults with the tools to live a life filled with meaning and purpose.