This essay is based on a question that seeks to find a critical deepening around the investigation of a type of rationality that inhabits modern education and that in our research we have chosen to call evaluative reason. The Deleuzian reflection on the control societies, subsidiary of Foucault’s notion of disciplinary societies, will be a phagocyte reference point to introduce us to the question of this type of rationality that, as we analyze here, also harbors characteristics of the so-called pastoral power in intimate relationship with the contemporary configurations of capitalism. It will be offered a provisional definition of the evaluative reason, in the light of the own analyzes that involve notions such as those of discipline, technologies of government, normalization and biopolitics–which we will rethink here–to advance in a more complex look that relates the ethical, the political, the social, and the economic, with the philosophical-educational, aspects of our approach as a way of approaching the nexus that this rationality sketches between education and the current control societies. In this way, the evaluative reason will open up as an ethical-political problem that is fundamental to address since: a) it has been historically configured in such a way that it crosses and bases practices, technologies and devices; b) with more and more subtle vigilance and increasingly justified sanctions in their “pedagogical” eagerness, it stands between monitoring and calculation that reduce all power of otherness; c) it has a racist dimension whose versatility allows it to move between normalization and normation; d) it helps multiply the market model by setting procedures that place the subject as a self-entrepreneur. Finally, the lines of this analysis hope to become clues to elucidate new forms of resistance and re-existence against the contemporary evaluative compulsion.
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