The Biosocial Turn: Education in the Postgenomic and Neuroscientific Era

Valerija Vendramin

Summary:  The contribution attempts to position education in the coordinates, lately settled by biosciences (explicitly neuroscience and epigenetics). In the introduction, the problematics of the entrance of biology (yet again) in the field of education is presented. It is specified why this entrance might today, in the postgenomic era, be different, possibly less problematic as far as the reflection on the division of the human world into the  biological  and  social  spheres is concerned. But this does not lead necessarily towards greater egalitarianism or lesser determinism. Following is the clarification of some of the terms used. After that, the attempt at reflection of the biological rationalities as new reference points in education and educational policies is made, with the warning about an uncritical proliferation of the discourses that bear the mark  bio . As pointed out by Maurizio Meloni, at this anthropological level  we can witness a global redefinition of the profile of our humanness in terms of an increasing weight of biological arguments . But, it must be kept in mind that there is a difference between  bio- -knowledges  (i.e. the findings coming from the new biological sciences) and bio-rationalities (i.e. the political and pedagogic discourses in which these findings are used).