ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the sciences of education as an actor in social affairs. It examines how the fabrication of human kinds in research functions as the autonomous subjects in the planning of educational change. The approach is a History of the Present. Fabrication is a strategy to think about the social science as a historical and material practice. Youth as a fabrication in research—a fiction and the making or manufacturing of things as “real”—can be initially given attention in the making of adolescence as a category of psychology. The historicizing of human kinds as historical fabrication goes against the logic of contemporary studies. The chapter utilizes the notion of fabrication to explore historically how the fictions that emerge to respond to changing social conditions loop back into ongoing events to order and classify modes of living. The fabrication of populations given attention in the social question was the object of policy and social reforms.
