Reason and school: what is (and is not) teachable (I)

Abstract

This article is the first one where one will display the results from a previous research aiming to fix the boundaries of a work field about the transmission of knowledge in modern society. More particularly, that research tries to achieve a first approach to the question: what is (and is not) teachable? In fact the modern experiment of «schooling» is yet unstudied in a large part, as regards to the conditions that made it possible epistemoligically and inevitable historically. But such an experiment does not appear by itself, concerning either the historical sociology of institutions or the history of science or even the economics. The modern school is a «historical workmanship» in straight relation with a kind of knowledge organization that is also «workmanly», if one compares it with the mode of knowledge production, proper to the greco-medieval science. It is exactly over this relation that the author is leaning, asking successive questions: what did such a cognitive mutation consist of? What genealogy of modern reason? How did school become an essential element for the production and reproduction of knowledge? Which mechanisms determine what is considered as knowledge and is conveyed by school and what is excluded from it? How is the pedagogical calling of science to be understood from its beginning and, inversely, the scientific calling of what is called pedagogy? How does knowledge normalize, in every sense of the word? The last target of this research is to suggest that the present crisis of school depends on the historical answers these and other questions may find.