Education as a social system
An introduction to Niklas Luhmann's theory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21910/rbsd.v13i3.961Keywords:
comunication, learning, organization, education, social systems theoryAbstract
This article introduces Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory as applied to education. From this perspective, education is not a process of transmitting knowledge but a communication system that seeks to trigger changes in consciousness without being able to control or directly verify them. This impossibility generates a constitutive tension: education must promise learning, yet it can only produce communications. To manage this paradox, the educational system combines interaction and organization. Interaction enables a partial approximation to consciousness while still treating it as environment, whereas organization stabilizes decisions, shifting attention toward verifiable procedures. The article identifies three key lines of inquiry from this perspective: the technological transformation of interaction, organizational expansion and the inflation of expectations, highlighting the limits of the modern educational system.
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