This paper demonstrates how education has operated since Modernity as a biopolitical action to govern the lives of the population, producing subjectivities attuned to the forms of production of its time. First, it analyses the emergence of industrial capitalism hinged to liberalism and it is shown that the modern public school constituted an important condition for the consolidation of its productive ways. Next, it analyzes the transition from liberalism to neoliberalism and from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism, problematizing some elements of the contemporary educational landscape that evidence that education continues to function as a biopolitical action, realigning their strategies and targets with work organization in Contemporaneity.
Education; biopolitics; governmentality; capitalism; labor