But then what does "child" mean? As it seems, this expression denotes the invention of the medium for purposes of communication. Since Aries' seminal publication, one knows (or: one dares to assume) that the child is a semantic entity, which must be distinguished from the organisms and the psychic peculiarities of the post-growing human beings.
The child is, we can therefore also say, an observer's construct. One has used this distinction child/organic and psychic system to enable historical investigations on the semantics child/childhood. The variability of meaning of what is explicitly and implicitly understood by "child" can be demonstrated historically. And however controversial the details may be and however unclear it may remain since when children have existed: it is obvious that this semantics is needed for pedagogical purposes and thus correlates with the differentiation of Education – first as a role specificity (as a simple societas) in the already complex domestic societas, then as school education. With the view that the child is the medium of education, a systematic theory is supplied for such investigations.
Obviously, the semantics child is based on easily recognizable peculiarities of these beings in contrast to adults. Without this difference, which is visible in body size and behavior, there would be no children. Children are the construct of a Distinction. This distinction enables the designation of one side as a child, and the externalities of this black box enable a construction of what may be going on "inside". The distinction: children are not adults, adults are not children, replaces, so to speak, the (impossible) elucidation of this black box – and for this it is initially indifferent whether children are unknowable and uncontrollable according to old cybernetics (for lack of Requisite Variety) or according to new cybernetics (as self-referential, historical Machines). [⇒Machines Are Participating in Communication]
It is sufficient to consider Spencer Brown's idea that in every distinction, i.e. also the one between children and adults, a difference is assumed, a boundary is marked, so that only by crossing this boundary one can get from one side to the other, i.e. shift the connecting point for further operations.
The advantage of the child/adult distinction lies in its obviousness, and as always, obviousness serves to obscure something. What is concealed is that one does not know and cannot know the systems that are so designated. The other distinction between child (or adult) and organic-psychic systems is covered. Only an observer of the observers who use the distinction child/adult, only an observer of the pedagogues notices that the child stands in the pivot of two distinctions. It is distinguished from the adult and from the organic-psychic systems, which are only called child (in contrast to the adult). Only in second-order cybernetics, only in the cybernetics of observing systems, it can be clarified that the child serves as a Medium for Education.
V.
In order to make clear that children are not children, even if they are described in this way, a digression must be inserted here, which will touch upon the foundations of a theory of socialization. The term child, as already indicated at the beginning of the previous section, refers to an entity which reproduces itself as an autopoietic system both through life and through consciousness. In the organic as well as in the mental sense, such systems are state-determined systems. That means: they continue their own operations starting from the state they are in, whereby this state is the result of their own previous operations. And they are structure-determined systems in the sense that they need structures for the continuation from operation to operation, which limit the range of connection possibilities, so that an observer can distinguish and designate their unity by describing their structures (here for example: attitudes, habits, character traits).
This characterization applies to people of any age, even to those who are not yet born; and it applies without exception. It obviously contradicts the semantics "child", which therefore has to be assigned to the one who designs and uses it to structure his own thinking or communication.
If one wants to explain why education nevertheless works successfully and does not get stuck in the world of its own errors, one has to start with the system features of state- and structure-determined autopoietic systems and with their self-referential closure (and not: with a hermeneutics of the meaning of childhood).
We are helped in this context by the notion of Structural Coupling, here: of communication and consciousness. Of course, communication, although autopoietically organized in its own sequence, is not possible without consciousness. Consciousness can operate without participation in communication and can even structure its own thought sequences linguistically; but it cannot come into being (or only in a very rudimentary form) if it has never participated in linguistic communication. Using a term of Humberto Maturana, such a connection can be called structural coupling. Structural couplings presuppose a continuum of materiality of a physical kind that supports them and makes common seeing and hearing possible. Their basis thus lies in another medium that enables the autopoiesis of communication and of consciousness without interfering with them in a determinative way. Structural couplings are therefore compatible with the autopoiesis of the coupled systems, which is an essential feature of the concept. They also do not enter the continuation of autopoiesis as a structural moment and thus as an operative requirement. On the screen of the involved systems, they become recognizable only as irritation, and as irritation that co-determines what happens on it.
Irritation is a system-specific state; it can occur, similar to surprise for example, only thanks to the recursive interconnectedness of operations and structures with which the system reproduces itself. Irritation is, in other words, not something that is already present in the environment and can then be transferred into the system. The transformation of structural couplings (here: of communication and consciousness) into irritations thus links a system/environment connection, which only an observer can see, with states of its own, to which the system can react autopoietically and, with more or less consequences, must react. Structural coupling gives impetus to a kind of permanent irritation of the systems; and if it repeats itself with a certain permanence and affects the system with a certain typicality (for instance as language), it can be assumed that it triggers structural developments in the system which an observer can recognize as directed, at least as not accidental. The key to the problem of socialization lies in the permanent irritations that occur in consciousness when it participates in communication again and again and in repeatable forms (language). It can be explained in this way (1) that all socialization is self-socialization, i.e. it cannot come about in the form of a transference; that it (2) produces a variety of systemic forms far beyond the triggering conditions, for example in a family very different children despite similar conditions; that it (3) nevertheless leads in a non-random direction, which makes it possible that people can adjust to each other in spite of self-referential closure, in spite of mutual intransparency and in spite of high structural difference; and that (4) the participation in linguistic communication with its distinctive, fascinating world of forms is the key experience for this – whatever the individual consciousness thinks of it.
Socialization in this complex sense depends on keeping linguistic communication going. For this, in more complex societies, certain improbability thresholds have to be overcome, and for this, only for this, the medium child serves in the case of education. If this is so, it will hardly be possible to avoid that the so-called child reacts to the fact that it is treated as such. One should know more about what happens in the consciousness when it registers that it is treated as a child (or at any rate: differently from adults); that is, whether and how the permissions and prohibitions, freedom concessions and notions of being able, not able, not yet able, not yet having to but still being able, lying in the context of this semantics, have an effect on structural changes of this system. It would be naïve to assume that these effects will automatically meet the pedagogical intention. For even when a consciousness learns to describe itself as a child and to take over the childlike part in communication, what then happens to the structures of the autopoiesis of consciousness is something completely different from what is thereby made possible or facilitated as communication.
VI.
At the beginning of the newer pedagogy stood the (today discredited) concept of the tabula rasa, on which must be drawn what the child has to become. In the historical context, it marks the rejection of "innate ideas" and even more the rejection of the moral physics of striving for perfection, which is inherent in nature and can only be supervised, only accompanied by educators. No, man is to be made. This is the signal for more effort and more responsibility, for differentiation of education.
We do not need to reopen this discussion, but we can nevertheless regard it as an anticipation of the determination of the child sought here. Nobody, not even Locke, would have assumed that man is an empty box into which arbitrary contents could be filled. It is just a black box with which an observer can experiment. The child is medium only in the sense that a sufficiently loose coupling of his thoughts and ideas can be assumed, which are then available for accesses, for form-strict couplings, especially for "knowledge". "Black box" means only that it is not possible to see through and to control how what is identified in this way functions internally. There is, in other words, no "Requisite Variety" towards it, and a fortiori no other mental system and no social system can establish a one-to-one relation of its elements to those of the black box, because that would mean to merge the systems into a single system. And this is true not only for external observation, but also and even more so for internal observation, for self-observation. For every observer, also for himself, the system is and remains intransparent.
The obviousness and exceptionlessness of this intransparency gives education the chance to construct a medium. Not knowing (and this includes that the observed system cannot know itself better, only differently) gives courage to the educators. They operate irrefutably in this fundamental sense – which, of course, does not preclude their gaining experience, learning, doing better or worse, insofar as they have memory. This is true for the psychological system of educators. It is even more true for the communication system of education. Intransparency is the take off for differentiation and thus for the self-determination of the differentiating systems. Or, to repeat: a one-to-one relationship of the elements would, if achievable, lead to the formation of a coalescing system.
With Rousseau's Emile, the tabula rasa concept was replaced by the more realistic concept of perfectibility. This abandons the tendency toward perfection postulated as nature and replaces it with the mere designation of a possibility. In it, success and failure are provided for, which is always introduced as a criterion of success, and the utopian staging of Emile's education makes it abundantly clear how unlikely success is. Perfection itself does not guarantee it, in any case.
The educators saw it differently. They had to find a place for themselves in the open concept of perfectibility, they had to take it as a medium into which one could implant good intentions. For them, therefore, perfectibility is the "ability to become ever more perfect as an endowment of man as distinguished from the animal." Thus conceived, the concept serves a function for the profession – much as the concept of original sin does for theologians: it is difficult, but not impossible. One can save souls or educate young people, but only with professional assistance. The concept encourages higher aspirations.
The fact that the designation child is a construct and can only function as a medium in this way does not mean that one can proceed arbitrarily. But one has to look for the limitations not so much in the organic-psychic systems designated as children, but in the system that practices this designation and condenses experiences with it. If one wants to know how the apparent arbitrariness of the construction is reduced, one has to observe the observer and not what he observes. The child is not a chemical, not a biological, not a psychological medium, it is not a carbon, not a protein, not an attention. It is a medium only in the system of education and the changes in the conception of this medium are therefore explained by the differentiation of a social functional system for education. Consequently, the next question is: how does the system of education deal with its medium?
VII.
We gain a first insight, if we pay attention to the Attribution problems, which appear with all symbolically generalized communication media and are solved differently in each case. Here, the attribution forms acting and experiencing are available depending on whether a behavior appearing on the outside of the black box is attributed to this system itself or to its environment. For the medium Child it is significant that as an educator one has to choose the attribution form experience, even and especially when the child obviously acts according to everybody's opinion and according to his own opinion. The extravagance (and artificiality) of the medium of education thus shows itself in the fact that an initially obvious attributional addressing is abandoned or bracketed and replaced by the question: how does the child experience when he behaves in a certain way? This is not least a suspension of the normal moral sanction mechanism and the creation of a free space for educationally specific sanctions, which can then lead to the formation of a selection medium on the basis of the difference of better or worse performance. Like all function-specific media, this too presupposes distance from morality; and the excuse here is that the child is "not yet" fully responsible for its actions (unlike adults!).
Along the more or less sustained intention to understand the child from his experience, the historical semantics of childhood also seems to have developed. One takes more and more empathy, observes the child as an observer of the world and recognizes that the world of the child is different from the world of the adults. At the same time, this meets the need to seek out opportunities for influence and not to educate in a way that the child can neither absorb nor understand. But while this insight also appears in older educational teachings and is certainly as old as the reflection on education per se, the differentiation of the educational system and the reflection accompanying it stimulates a perspective à la "Second Order Cybernetics": an observation of the child as observer and a corresponding restraint of attributions of action. The problem of education will be not to set action against action, but to choose action according to the experience of the other. And while in the case of love, Ego's action should be chosen in such a way that it confirms the experience of Alters, in the case of education it must aim not at confirmation but at correction.
Another form of decoupling might be that the educator sees learning and not the unlearning or relearning necessary for it. In teaching, the educator distinguishes learning from unlearning, thus making it easier to imagine his task and to control its effects. In the mental system (but of course also in the organism, concerning for example body postures) learning and unlearning, on the other hand, can only be practiced as a unity and thus indistinguishable. Everything learned has to be revised in further learning. The idea of cumulative knowledge covers this fact, covers the psychological complexity of the process and thus also what could contribute to the motivation or demotivation of further learning. But this very covering of too much information is achieved with the child's semantics, and this allows the educator to imagine working toward growth.
The sum of skills, knowledge and reflections that follow these artifices, stimulated as it were by the perplexity they create, is called *Pedagogy* in the profession's self-understanding.
This says something about the medium, but nothing about the form of the form with which the educational system fulfills its function. We recall: medium and form are correlative terms, two sides of a distinction, and the difference is whether elements are loosely or strictly coupled. The forms to which education contracts the possibilities of its medium can be described by the concept of Knowledge.
Education is about the transmission of knowledge. It would be wrong (or at least one-sided) to use "knowledge" to refer to a particular attitude toward the world, such as a cognitive as opposed to normative one, a rational as opposed to emotional one, a passive as opposed to active, volitional one. All these concepts of knowledge occur, we leave them aside. Here, knowledge is to designate in general the structure with the help of which mental systems can continue their autopoiesis, i.e. can find, connect, actualize next thoughts starting from their respective current state. In this sense, the concept of knowledge is a concept for redundancy, for non-arbitrariness of the operative connections in the temporal course of the autopoiesis of the system.
Since Dynamically Stable Systems of this kind are currently always in a state which changes again immediately, knowledge also occurs only in the moment. The whole system consists of self-produced Events, thus of the in each case actualized sense references. Everything else is situation for the event, world horizon for the sense system. Thus, there are no stocks of knowledge, and memory is not to be understood as "memory", but as a consistency check newly updated from moment to moment. (Therefore, we do not need to know that we know and how we know and since when we know that a door is to be opened with the door handle. The situation is usually redundant enough, that is: we find enough clues for an operational consistency check). Only an observer (but this can also be the operating system itself) can introduce knowledge in the time scheme, i.e. ask and, if necessary, determine whether one, why one, how long one has known something certain. And only an observer can form ideas about the further use of knowledge in future cases – but also he does this only in the moment by doing this, thus only in the consummation of his own autopoiesis. Thus, if teachers assume that the knowledge they impart to their students will be useful in their future, this is their (all too understandable) observer knowledge; and they do not know it when they are busy with something else, such as digging their garden in the afternoon. All knowledge has only temporal actuality, and inactual (actualizable) knowledge can exist only as the actual knowledge of an observer.
Education and school also have to deal with this reality of dynamic-stable systems. But it refrains from it. And it can refrain from it, because it operates (observes) with a distinction between medium and form that is specific for it. In education and schooling, one imagines that children can acquire and retain knowledge or (what they should not) forget it. Knowledge, viewed in this way, is the contraction of the medium to specific, tightly coupled forms, and it is assumed that the children being educated can handle it (or at least should learn to do so) whenever it comes into consideration. Therefore, knowledge is largely imagined as a transformation function that can be called up in situations, with the consequence that whenever there is an occasion for actualization, this knowledge will be used appropriately and correctly. This means nothing else than that children are to be brought to be trivial machines, which they cannot be and cannot become. Obviously, education is in the service of socially demanded reliability, because only trivial machines are reliable machines, which (if they are not broken) always convert inputs into outputs in the same way.
The scheme of enduring knowledge, seen as the child's form and binding of possibilities, has numerous peculiarities that are overlooked only because the enduringness (the "havingness") of knowledge is treated as "obvious." The importance of writing deserves special attention in this context. Here it is not only about learning to write and read in the sense of a skill to be used daily, but about the question how this peculiar form of perception works; and not only about the fact that it itself stands out as a difference to other optical perceptions like spoken language in the medium of acoustics, but about the fact that it serves as a form for formations, i.e. in its turn as a medium. Writing opens up a space of possibilities that can no longer be exhausted by any individual and that remains stable even if the contents change; not the heaven of heavens, but the form of the forms that serve as culture. Writing "potentializes" culture by preserving even what is not written as something that could be written if needed. (This is true to an even greater degree for phonetic scripts, which destroy any illusion of a closed world as soon as their presence becomes universal through letterpress printing). This forces selection methodology, forces consequence learning, forces the transition from situational to systematic relevance. And at the same time these effects, because they are owed to the medium-function (and not only to the form) of writing, obscure what is let into the child as a form generating form.
In addition, there is the relevance of truth, which is imposed by education (and which in turn depends on scripture). In mental autopoiesis, knowledge functions, if at all, independently of whether it is true or untrue knowledge according to the opinion of observers (just as the brain does not provide different neurophysiological processes for true and for untrue ideas). In the classroom, on the other hand, it is important that only true knowledge is taught and learned (but this, too, functions as a communicative operation in exactly the same way and just as well when it is a matter of untrue knowledge). Operations are always indifferent to the fact whether an observer calls the meant sense true or untrue by means of the special distinction true/untrue. And one must say: Fortunately! Because in the other case the scheme true/untrue would stop the autopoiesis of the operating system at the next opportunity, namely at an "untrue" operation for lack of connectivity and the system would cease to exist. Long ago all brains, all consciousness systems and even more all teaching systems would have disappeared, if it would be like that.
At least in schools, however, the student is expected to learn knowledge that has been tested as true. One can expect it of him, because one regards him as child (adolescent etc.). For the selection of the material the legitimation by science is sufficient. Science, however, does not guarantee knowledge the form in which it can be used psychologically and situationally. This explains striking discrepancies between everyday competence and scholastic ability. This is true not only for foreign language teaching (for which there are certainly corrective measures), but also, for example, for dealing with algorithms. Research on this is in its infancy, but it already clearly shows that everyday competence (when children are, so to speak, engaged like adults) can be far higher than what is demonstrated and rewarded as arithmetic in schools. Children can perform arithmetic operations in games, on the street or in jobs, which they cannot reproduce in school with arithmetic taught there.
Furthermore, the octroying of forms in a medium can only ever be selective. It exploits certain possibilities and, by favoring them, eclipses others. All learning in school therefore presupposes corresponding Prohibitions of Learning; and in view of the openness of a medium, naturally much more learning must be prohibited than released by teaching.
Finally, the knowledge learning program discredits an intrinsically beneficial facility of dynamically stable systems, namely, forgetting. [⇒Oblivion]
If knowledge consists in nothing else than its current use for organizing autopoiesis, it is obvious that it will be reused or not reused depending on the sequences of state changes, depending on the history of the systems. Thus, depending on where things go, knowledge is subject to natural selection. What is reused condenses into experience and thus takes on a form that defies all exact description. What is not reused is ultimately no longer retrievable, as all experiences with literacy campaigns in developing countries teach us. An important consequence for our context is that adults cannot remember what it was like to be a child. They have to reinvent the "world of the child" on the other person.
The sinking of the non-repeated takes place unnoticed (noticing would be repeating) and has an important function for systems that have to function as structurally determined systems. In the schema medium/form or child/knowledge, on the other hand, forgetting is dispreferenced or even feared as mischief and sharply censored.
All these considerations show that the medium of education institutionalizes an extremely artificial way of observation. That is why it is difficult to deal with it. And that is why the teaching of the possibilities to do it anyway has special names. On the side of the medium, as already mentioned, it is called *Pedagogy*, on the side of the form, however, it is called *Didactics*.
VIII.
In the natural Pedagogy of the tradition, children are distinguished according to age and degree of Maturity. Therefore, they were considered adults at a relatively early age (from today's point of view). In the more recent pedagogy, however, another distinction is surreptitiously gaining ground. It consists in the question whether children can read or not. It is not only a question of whether children have learned the skill of reading or not or not yet, which makes it difficult to understand. Rather, what is crucial to the possibility of discrimination at this point is the printing of books and the availability of books for self-reading before and after school.
Traditional written cultures also knew written knowledge, of course, but they generally used it only as an aid to Oral Communication. Oral communication, in life as in school, could refer to written texts. It could gain teaching authority in knowledge and understanding of these texts. Teaching was conceived as a transmission process. Learning was mechanical acceptance, and understanding the scholar was a later reward and confirmation of adulthood. This changes fundamentally with the printing of books. Books recommend themselves for "self-learning." For schools, this means that teaching can develop self-learning skills and then reckon with them. Teaching and learning are now completely different modes of operation, and their integration, which is nevertheless to be striven for, becomes a problem. The resulting reformulated pedagogy is no longer measured only in terms of getting the material into the children's heads, but in terms of developing the ability to learn. The "cram school" falls into disrepute. The school is now in demand as an educational institution. Accordingly, natural education, which accompanies the aging process, is now recommended only for an initial phase in which children are still children. And this is followed by the phase of school attendance and study, in which education is promoted in the sense of the earliest possible independence in dealing with reading.
The caesura of reading and self-learning skills revolutionizes the semantics of childhood. It not only determines what happens in school or university with sufficiently developed competencies. In a kind of backward projection, it is also applied to early childhood education. Here, too, it is now no longer simply a matter of dressage, but of learning in an educative (may one say educagenic?) milieu. The total medium of the child is transformed. The medium of the child, as we know it today, is a result of printing and thus also a genuinely social medium.
IX.
A good medium, useful for functional systems, presupposes that it is not consumed by the formation of form, but is renewed at the same time. Parsons calls this "circulation" with a daring metaphor. Thus, by using power in the form of collectively binding decisions, the ruler makes himself visible and, by enforcing decisions, holds out the prospect of other, equally enforceable decisions. Thus, money does not consume itself by being spent for certain purposes in certain amounts (i.e., taking shape), but renews its medial potency in the payment process itself. Thus, truth gains as well as untruth gains are particularly valued in modern science if they give rise to further research questions, and where this is not the case, truth or untruth quickly becomes uninteresting. And in the case of education?
As long as there was talk about "education" (or there still is), there was no solution of this problem in sight, and that always means: no solution, therefore no problem. This is obviously true for the case of an education canonized at the reading material, where it is sufficient in the Educational System to bring the children into the form determined thereby. But even if one opens up the concept of education with Klafki for historically current, i.e. changing social problems, this does not clarify how the medium can regenerate itself despite the formation of form. The impetus for changes in form, i.e. changes in educational content and teaching topics, is expected from the social environment of the educational system. This is a contribution to the explanation of the dynamics of the system that should not be underestimated (if we disregard the fact that it is formulated in value terms in the context of education). The side glance at other media such as power, money and truth, which can themselves provide for their regeneration, i.e. trigger a momentum of the system, however, raises the question whether the medium of the educational system does not also have corresponding possibilities.
And indeed: one only has to replace the formula education by the formula Learning Ability to get such possibilities into view.
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