Mirroring school. A systems theoretical outline of the differentiation of transnational education in Europe
(2018) European Conference on Educational Research — Location: Bolzano (4.September.2018)
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- Abstract
- In 2014 the European Commission introduced a reform of its previous funding efforts in the realm of education, which regrouped them together under a single banner, baptized as ‘Erasmus+’. With this new instrument, it funds a wide array of educational activities that range far beyond the institutional limits of what Guy Vincent (1994) once coined the forme scolaire. Actively relying on the infinite character of semantic formulas centred around learning (cf. Luhmann & Schorr, 2000, p. 101), the programme offers financial support for projects of transnational networks that are capable of gathering, even if only temporally, a plurality of institutions, educational and non-educational alike, around a once-only objective, that is not expected to be repeated. The program so gives articulate expression to Europe’s (1995, p. 20) credo that “no single institution, school or company, can claim to be able to develop the skills needed” for life in the advent learning society. This paper starts from the curious coincidence of the establishment of a European educational space (Nóvoa & Lawn, 2002) with the active corrosion of the institutional contours of school (Young, 2010) in order to examine how such transnational education thus mirrors, therefore both mimics and deviates from the morphogenesis of the national school system. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Niklas Luhmann, it argues for understanding the Europeanisation of education as a case of (and means for) “growth by internal disjunction” (Luhmann, 1982, p. 231). That is: as an internal differentiation of the education system in a global world society (Luhmann, 1997), which surpasses the limits the latter developed in reference to the nation-state, thus resettling and dramatically expanding the limits of what is meaningful as education. Reviewing Luhmann’s sociology of education, the paper demonstrates how transnational projects formalise education into new a specification, that profoundly differs from the national conception of education as classroom interaction (cf. Luhmann, 2002, pp. 119-121). This difference between the form of school and transnational education projects is then discussed against the background of the Luhmannian distinction between medium and form. The paper so underlines how transnational education projects, now as a (dissemination) medium, establish a ‘demographic effect’ (Luhmann, 1990, pp. 93-96) that differs from mass schooling. Their ensemble does not generate a single point of reference for a Durkheimian collective consciousness (Luhmann, 2013). Instead, the singularity of each project is valued and thus transnational education joins a wider, historical transition that favours variation over redundancy -novelty over repetition- in order to both forget and remember more (cf. Esposito, 2008).
- Affiliations
Pieter Vanden Broeck Pieter Vanden Broeck
Citations
Vanden Broeck, P. (2018). Mirroring school. A systems theoretical outline of the differentiation of transnational education in Europe. European Conference on Educational Research, Bolzano. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/89196