ABSTRACT

This chapter argues the numbers of statistics in educational phenomena. It explores how numbers work, not simply as descriptions but as embodied desires of futures that are to be actualized through planning. The chapter presents the making of kinds of people entails double gestures and a paradox: the very practices to include and change populations in the name of progress and equity doubles back on itself as processes of exclusion and abjection or the casting of kinds of people into unlivable spaces. It focuses on the reasoning is to recognize a significant fact of modernity: governing is exercised less through brute force and more through the systems of reason that fabricate kinds of people and biographies. The chapter also explores statistics historically as cultural practices that entail a paradox: the finding of numerical equivalences to understand differences and inclusion produce differences about the qualities and characteristics of people.