Education activity, as it took form and was conceived in its institutional dimension, is to a great extent heir of a vision of the world that finds its own epistemological
“parenthood” in the assumptions of the experimental science inaugurated by Galileo and in those of the cognitive-methodological reflection done by Cartesio. Many, and more or less, explicit consistencies about man’s and nature’s behaviour exist between these two fathers of modernity, but the strategical object that more deeply correlate them is the methodological dedication of the purging mechanism; that one which sets itself up as a guardian of the fact that the variables seen as disturb- ers do not have to interfere in the scene of knowledge. And this implies to enter a one-dimensional way, seen as the one able to lead to the pure moment—immanent (in) to truth—that necessarily underlies the logical construction of an order as much as possible safe from capricious behaviours of the phenomenal reality. Thus, the regulatory ideal of knowledge relates to the image of a compact world, internally united, uniform, without smudges. In such direction, the moves to make lead to the construction of governing criteria that assign to the domains of disciplines the territories pertaining to them, in order to make them obedient.
Substantially, the birth of “good manners” is not limited to the regulatory activ- ity of social being prescribed by the etiquette. This latter, indeed, may be read as a paradigmatic metaphor of a more profound and (omni)comprehensive activity organizing things, that has the power to legitimize or delegitimize the approach to a phenomenal reality, the knowledge of which is directed to identify regularities, and to confer them legal citizenship.
The purging strategy will shape knowledge and its transmission according to the regulations of modernity. In this sense and except some occasional discordances, not even the Darwinian revolution, with its reintroducing history into natural phe- nomena, will bring significant changes within the influential thought of the time: the strength of the progressive ideology, of Enlightenment origins, will give credence to a selective operating, on the basis of which nature will be gradually seen intent on sieving itself (to purify itself) in the accomplishment of an ameliorative way according to a trajectory teleologically oriented. The “step by step,” by conjugating itself with “the exception that confirms the rule,” will form those guiding principles which any cognitive undertaking will have to relate to, above all any educational undertaking (Bocchi & Ceruti, 2004). The condition of ideality peculiar to the experimental laboratory basically expands into a generalized syntax: eliminating the disturbing action produced by any noise to take precautions against dangers of deviances, so as to give life to a limpid and linear concatenation of causes and ef- fects, becomes the first and one move legitimate to make, the only one that allows not to controvert itself, thanks to its own capability to always produce identical responses in space and in time.
To collocate the discoveries of knowledge in the timelessness means to make them safe from whims and mutabilities of history, to give them assured fundaments, only traceable in the antecedence of that nontime situated before the great and frescoed floor on which the narration of the “unordered” human affairs and natural occurrences then will be painted. Above all it falls to science—whose metrics is mainly dictated by classical mathematics—to find out that undefiled background rhythm that dictates times and ways, by resorting to a scope of canonical practices epistemologically oriented towards the oneness of the method (Ceruti, 1986). Correlatively, the edu- cational thought of modernity arranges an apparatus of its own markedly turned to identify a didactic path that has to conform with the conditions connoting scientific practices so as to be able to title itself of scientific reliability. In particular, it has to conform with those more specifically expressed by truth capability that assigns imperiality to the so-called hard sciences. The primary task of education is that of teaching literacy to the observance of a method seen as the one main way, the only one which can guarantee superimposable outcomes, in space and time.
Indeed, the text underlying the narration (and that beats the time) of disciplines sets up as a continuous invitation not to overflow from the linearity of deterministic tracks: the briefest, the most immediately visible, the most calculable, the purest, and the most suitable one to clear out the way from the distracting weirdness of
surface, frequently present in phenomenal reality. Related to this, some tools—made transparent by their continuous presence—accompany the educational course so that possible deviances can be brought again within the domain of a container which results to be the only legitimate space of the possible.
Programs, texts, explicative, organizational and executive modalities, added to those of hierarchical ordering, have to be extremely indifferent to space and time:
if I have to live the space belonging to the form of the winning knowledge, then I cannot but go into a world different from the specificities of my local and historical context to adhere to spaceless and timeless forms. By letting cultures meet, those forms without time and space reduce knowledge strategies, elaborated over vari- ous singular stories, up to suppress them. Indeed, the purging mechanism requires an active, unexhausted work of decontextualization, of rescission of relationships that objects (even mental) maintain among themselves. This in accordance with the necessity to continually redefine themselves in the vital dynamism of relationship and with galaxies of other objects dialoguing in their turn. Obedience and submis- sion to manipulation can be demanded from the isolated object, hardly obtainable by other and less reductionist ways.
Basically, the perspective of the literacy designed by modernity educates to an ideal reachability of a privileged point of view (the same which leads to the Self), thanks to which it is finally possible to reveal that core made of “a few and simple laws” which rule man and nature. Found the linear causalistic method, the attain- ment of the goal turns out in a gradual accumulation of knowledge on knowledge, according to the well-known normative and epistemological image of “step by step” (Ceruti, 1986).
The passage from a universe that is considered simple to another one seen as a com- plex universe shows the turning point occurred to oppose not the classic thought, but its presumed exhaustiveness. And that passage was made necessary because of unavoidable questions related to the advancement and the multiplication of those moments seen as exceptional ones, eliminated by the scientific thought over the previous centuries as elements of trouble. As from the second half of the 19th cen- tury, some inklings of the necessity to operate changes of direction start to appear.
Those inklings become more and more insistent till the radical turning point, datable halfway through the last century, above all with “machines that think,” the comput- ers, entering the society. Actually, their appearance marks a sort of methodological revolution. A very influential one: divisions among disciplines fail. On the contrary more disciplines, some of them considered unrelatable by traditional classifications, start to dialogue about a common project, shared by all. And that shall lay the basis for the birth and the evolution of the systemic thought.
Once failed the immune strength of the one method, the finiteness and the alleged exhaustivenesses of definitions, which tended to isolate objects and make them mute, fail as well, with their vocation for circumscribing. What emerges with
greater strength in every ambit of inquiry is, in fact, the existence of a complex net of relationships among the various constitutive parts of a construct, read as a system; rather, in most cases, relationship is the condition for the possibility itself of existence of each part (Latour, 1993).
This does not bring to dismiss classical science or not to acknowledge its capabil- ity of identifying statistically regularities which exist as well; if anything, it invites classical science to integrate itself in a wider spectrum of knowledge paths, made possible by the paradigmatic necessity to adopt other points of view, as well.
The change, therefore, implies the revision of the strategies of positioning. If now objects show themselves as tentacular and advance beyond the territorialities of the disciplines into which they had been compressed, then garrisoning the confines they cross over becomes necessary so as to identify the branches and the relationships that they set up with objects allocated in different territories and not necessarily concomitant. From a history of universes prevalently unrelated, the internal history of science of the 19th century becomes a history of relationships punctuated by limi- tative theorems, by distances as regards certain assumed balances, by instabilities, dissipations, orders born of disorders, recursiveness, asymmetries, non-linearities, chaotic realities, temporal courses which, after centuries of phenomena seen through timelessness, enter again the knowledge scene with a primary constructive role (Capra, 1996).
Physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, science of evolution, science of cognition, science of communication, are only some among the numerous domains which, in a metacognitive direction, think again of the way they had thought (of) themselves;
in this way, they open onto new and unknown relationships through the necessity to build bridges, to institute transits among knowledge, to elaborate metaphors so as to overlap places semantically heterogeneous, to organize among the different disciplines those forms of dialogue that can be at the same time cooperative, com- petitive, antagonist, complementary, causative, impedimental, and so forth.
Even if summary, these are some of the significant traits indicating the dynamism connected to the re-orientation of many and influential knowledge related to the sciences of man and nature. Nevertheless, the panoramic view cannot also ignore the definite presence of those knowledge related to technological domains which, with their pressing rapidity of proceeding and overpassing themselves, oblige to newer and newer ways of organizing observation and relationship, to new organizational reflections about the very organizing ways.
The acceleration that connotes technological innovation speeds up and empha- sizes the difference between “before” and “after.” It leads the “awkwardness” of the antecedence to a continuous derision and obliges to the obsolescence those practices which do not operate in direction of newer and newer and unpredictable morphologies of acting.
Man has always been creator of technology and has established with technology a relationship of interactive nature; but this relationship has developed for some decades according to a dimension that reveals a growing intimacy, so as to give birth to a manifest crossbreeding of biological and cognitive order. Bio- takes shape increasingly as a technobio- and techno increasingly as a biotechno- . This also makes clear the extraordinary colonizer power got by technology. And in virtue of this power it has definitively disproved those images that wanted it (to be) in a subordinate position as for science, that assigned to it the part of impure child, because instrumentally submitted to the interests of the world, the part of something born of immateriality uninterested in theoric reflection. Basically, we are assisting at a sort of “reckoning of accounts” directed to revise the assignation of places, which produces a curious overturning. Today, a large part of the scientific activity devotes itself to interpret what technology produces; and that it is produced, as stated before, with innovative rhythms more and more accelerated and sometimes without the necessity to provide theoric basis to the artefacts it gives birth to (Stengers, 1993).
The technosphere is one of the relevant living and operating contexts to man, but paradoxically, and unlike what happened in the “mechanistic” civilization, the more technology evolves in the micronized and nanofied dimension of electron- ics, biology, bioelectronics, and so forth, the less users seem to be interested in the knowledge of those conditions of functioning that, in case of need, would allow them to intervene in the processes.
In fact, this disinterest masks a pretence: to ignore that the relationship with technol- ogy demands the carrying out of real tasks. Aware of this “unwillingness,” technol- ogy silently intervenes in making up through the creation of conscientious agents that, with their operation, solve problems and remove obstacles so as to allow users to (inter)act in the unawareness of the “duties” they should face. The birth of the actual interest in the most advanced forms of technology coincides with the birth of the disinterest, as well as actual, in their conditions of functioning. This is due, likely, to the failure of the certainties created by determinist paradigms of classical science.
As though the failure of the gears with their mechanical movement, didactically repetitive, “by the light of the sun,” had made current facilities opaque, as though the entry of nonlinearity, of bricolage, of weakness of the scientific “absolutes,” of causality, had created a sort of new anthropological territory that does not question the rational curiosity, but it awakes the desire of magic, the desire of that dispropor- tion that elapses between the accomplishment of a minimal gesture and the achieve- ment of a overabundance. The icon on the desktop, with its physicalness, hides the processes that its function presupposes: it is sufficient the mouse button so that it opens a world of “at pleasure” dimensions, but if on the one hand this discloses its friendly availability in introducing into a path devoid of obstacles, on the other hand, it gives value to its presence by dramatizing the existence of a world to which none, if not a priest, can think to enter (Norman, 1988).
All the ongoing events, above all in the domain of technology and technosciences, with particular reference to the universe of digital communication—involve not secondary modifications in the ways of seeing and practising the world. The net, in the light of the new historical conditions which it creates, forces to renew the inter- pretation of several pivotal elements of knowledge that have contributed noticeably to the construction of civilizations, in particular of the Western civilization. Likely, the quality of the questions whose answers gave birth to the fundamental reflections of classical science has to be rethought; for instance, the quality of the questions about the ways of experiencing time, or the ways of conceptualizing space, causal- ity, relationship, balance, evolution, and so forth.
The awareness of the ongoing changes imposes to review also the map of knowl- edge. And it is in relation to those knowledge that a new reflection about the ways of knowing has to evolve.
In that direction, what becomes important is to reconsider the territorial acquisitions of traditionally meant knowledge and, in case of necessity, to integrate them (and/or to reformulate them) with the new realities correlated to technology (to technosci- ence) and to the conditions more or less immediately visible that it poses. This means to assign new and demanding commissions to an epistemology of technology, as a sort of vedette, seen as a necessary element of reflection about nature, meanings and senses of technology itself and about its ways of referring to man. It deals with a moment of knowledge directed towards the elaboration of equipments inter and transdisciplinary, suitable to a first comprehension of the complex properties emerg- ing from those mobile universes that are under construction (Stengers, 1993).