The end of schooling and education for “calamity”

In this article, after delineating a Deweyan framework that reclaims the autonomy of education against any instrumentalization, while not curtly writing off the vocabulary of instrumentalism, I will address the question of the “what and what for” of education in reference to schooling and, more particularly, to an emerging emphasis on the fact that new technology should result in an overhaul (if not a demise) of the “scholastic” project. By taking my cue from some ideas of Michel Serres, I will espouse a longue durée perspective and will show how the contemporary discourse on a de-schooling via technology is actually the radicalization of the modern gesture of Descartes. At the same time, though, I aim at deconstructing this conceptual device and at showing how a thinking-through-penmanship is operative there so that we can state that the cogito is predicated upon the gesture of handwriting and, therefore, requires schooling as its pre-condition. In this sense, while bringing to a close the most obsolete forms of modern schooling can represent a horizon for educational theory and practice, it would be calamitous to let the “scholastic” project itself come to a conclusion.