Of course, we are not talking about mass media. But the widespread idea that media mediate a transmission process must also be abandoned. It is not about how it is possible to bring something (for example information) from A to B.
It is about generation and reproduction of an evolutionarily improbable mode of operation, namely communication. It is about emergence of a new kind of reactivity on the basis of a presupposed Continuum of materiality, which is physically-chemically-biologically and in our case then also linguistically-socially given. It is about drawing Boundaries into this continuum, about gaining Form.
These considerations already show that the distinction Medium/Form can be applied several times, indeed forms hierarchies in the sense that what functions as form in one distinction is medium again in another and can accommodate higher formations. (This is precisely why, in an abstract notion of distinction, we are bound by vague notions such as [relatively] loose and [relatively] strict coupling). In this sense, words of speech, for example, though themselves strict form in an acoustic or optical perceptual medium, can in turn be used as a medium; for they leave wide open how they can be combined into sentences, that is, coupled into more strict form. And the example also shows that shaping does not eliminate or consume the medium, but presupposes it as always reshapable.
For Language it can be well clarified after all that it functions as form and as medium at the same time. This ingenious property enables language to serve as a structural coupling of self-contained systems of consciousness and systems of communication. Language enters consciousness as a shaping of the medium of perception – first acoustically, since the invention of writing also optically. In the context of social communication, language uses the words, sharply formed for perceptual purposes, as a medium for gaining new forms, the very sentences that communication makes use of. Of course, words did not develop first, then sentences, first systems of consciousness, then systems of society. Language is condition and result of the co-evolution of mental and social systems. But this makes all the more clear that it is a highly improbable evolutionary achievement, which can be decoded and described with the distinction medium/form, but cannot yet be explained genetically.
All this is presupposed when symbolically generalized communication media emerge. In the typical case this happens via Binary Coding. The positive value, which denotes the connectivity of the operations, is contrasted with another value, a negative value, a reflection value, which says that all connectible operations (all payments, all claims to power, all collective binding decisions, all knowledge fixations, etc.) could also turn out differently without this ending the autopoiesis of the system. Binary coding is, in other words, a significant, indeed the leading invention in the development of society of the reconstitution of a medium above the language which is always already in forms and only so usable.
And how, if at all, does Education do it when it has no means of its own binary coding (except for selection purposes)?
IV.
As briefly indicated above, education faces the problem that it cannot do what it wants. It has to deal with psychic (mental) systems that only do what they do. A pupil who grins, grins. A student who calculates, calculates.
One can react to this communicatively by reprimand or praise, but there is no way to specify the courses of consciousness that result from this by communication.
Moreover, we are not dealing with trivial machines, which react according to the always same transformation function, but with self-referential machines, which determine themselves by their own operations, what they start from in the following operation, thus becoming always new machines from moment to moment.
With all this, the educator is also dealing with black boxes, which she can only observe in their externalities. This means not least that the attempt to control what is going on here ends in being controlled by these systems. The teacher, if she wants to achieve something, is forced to move. She must, especially if she wants to act according to a plan, constantly react as events dictate. And even if he takes certain liberties, the hard law applies that all control presupposes being controlled by the controlled. Or in other words: One can only gain influence in a system and only by submitting to the influences in the system. And now: where are there possibilities here to form a medium which, thanks to loose coupling, can be shaped by the pedagogically intended forms?
The answer is as simple as it is surprising, as classic as it is (in this context) novel. *The medium is the child.* One only has to refrain from the fact that children as well as adults, babies and adolescents of all ages are without exception structurally determined systems. In all cases these systems assume only the states which they prescribe to themselves and carry out only the operations which they perform on the basis of their momentary states. This is true for babies with the same, indeed perhaps with even greater self-evidence as it is for adults. It applies to everyone without exception.