School Technology in a Scenario of Acceleration: Persistence, Wear, and Limits

Abstract

This article proposes understanding the modern school as a historical technology of knowledge transmission, whose persistence and effectiveness are explained by the consolidation of a stable set of regularities that articulate knowledge, bodies, time, and expectations under a shared rationality. From a theoretical-genealogical approach, grounded in educational historiography, Foucauldian genealogy, and critical studies of technology and acceleration, the article analyses how the school achieved the massive expansion of education through the institutionalization of the modern pansophic ideal -“teaching everything to everyone”- and how this very principle is now beginning to overflow. Rather than interpreting the so-called “school crisis” as a problem of efficiency or implementation, the article conceptualizes it as a process of technological wear produced by the friction between a form designed to organize the long temporalities of formation and a techno cultural environment marked by acceleration, knowledge abundance, and non-hierarchical circulation. The analysis argues that the school neither disappears nor is replaced, but it loses its capacity to hegemonize contemporary educational experience. The resulting scenario is an interregnum without guarantees, characterized by the unstable coexistence between the persistence of school technology and knowledge drifts that overflow it without constituting alternatives.