Education as Communication: The Approach of Niklas Luhmann

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop the idea previously introduced by the authors about domestic education as a system and its semantic content. The authors turn to a comparison of approaches to domestic higher education as an object of socio-philosophical research. As a methodological basis for their analysis, they choose the system-communicative theory. It is proposed to consider the education system not from the point of view of the search for unity and unification, but from the position of its “specific distinction” proposed by Luhmann. The concept of «distinction» used by Luhmann differs in meaning from the concept of «contradiction», which Hegel considered as the source of all development. The origins of the theory of distinction lie in second-order cybernetics, developed in the 1970s and 1980s. As a first approximation, the meaning of «specific distinction» is preliminarily revealed in Gregory Bateson’s formulation: «Information is difference that makes difference». The communicative approach to the analysis of the education system allowed the authors to come to the conclusion about the preference of its pre-adaptive behavior in comparison with the adaptive behavior. Thus, adaptation acts as a property of the system’s adjustment to already existing conditions and challenges from the external environment; pre-adaptation is the process of accumulation of excess (redundancy) potential, which contributes to the creation of effective mechanisms of the system’s own development with unpredictable challenges in the future. These two properties of the system are two sides of the same coin. Such an approach, from the authors’ point of view, will allow a better understanding of both the diagnostics of the current state of the educational system and themethods for its possible reform.