The Child as the Medium of Education

Inquiries into the medium of education take up a question that has so far usually been answered teleologically or psychologically. The coherence of educational endeavors has been illustrated by their objective, and this again has been illustrated by the changes in the state of the educatees. The difficulty of such an approach is that no educator is able to know the inner state of the educatee, i.e., that which the latter really experiences, remembers, and expects during the process of education. Moreover, the drawback of all teleology is that it does not provide a concept for understanding the frequent failure of these efforts. Here, Niklas Luhmann demonstrates that this kind of teleological theory can be replaced by the distinction between medium and form. [Translated by Michael King and Christian Morgner.]