Schooling, Human Capital and Civilization

Book excerpt: 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.