Pharmaceutical neuroenhancement as challenge in public and school discourse

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Alfred Schäfer
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2011 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 202040577

Neuroenhancement describes the intake of drugs that are known from ADHD therapies as well as therapies of depression for the purpose of increased performance and concentration. The ongoing research project investigates how related problems (difference of illness and health, anthropological questions, self-determination and authenticity, social justice, as well as equal opportunity) are articulated in public discourse as well as within schools. Thus, the discursive formations of problems of self-determination and social pressure, of performance pressure and distributive justice is analyzed, assuming their relevance for educational settings. First results indicate that in public discourse the freedom of self-determination is prevalent. Therefore, the topic of social injustice is less prominent even though the social pressure of performance is present. The omission of social justice also takes place within the school discourse when teachers and students refer to the Calvinist principle of performance. By requesting the correspondence of students efforts and school grades problems of distributive justice are relativized in a particular way: The possibility of neuroenhancement occupies an ambivalent role between health and illness. Both discourses do not put the distinction between disease and health, legality and illegality in the foreground. They focus on social justice in a rather simplifying way by referring to self-determination and self-realization. The question is how the two discourses do intersect and how the educational realm is constituted as its own space in view of the challenge of neuroenhancement.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants