Whose life is it anyway? The life course as an observational medium in the education system

Abstract

System theory defines the life course (Lebenslauf) as the medium of education. It is a medium, because the educator sees it as a potential for intervention, impressing pedagogically acceptable forms onto it. Yet the single individuals who are educated are autonomous observers who are exposed to an immense quantity of possible configurations of their lives. This raises a first question: how can education legitimate intentions and motivate pupils to accept the forms with which they collaborate, but which they have not chosen for themselves? A further question is raised by the fact that the life course does not coincide with the ‘career’ that each individual constructs for himself during his lifetime, when he is oriented towards roles in organisational terms (such as jobs) or that are in any case external to the system of education. This paper proposes the hypothesis that the life course and the career are coupled to each other by means of educational selection (certificates and qualifications). While this increases the potential available to the individual, it also increases uncertainty, the burden of decision-making and related risks. One skill that could be developed during education is the ability to manage this potential for combinations.

Introduction: the media of education

If we ask ourselves about the real nature of education, about how it is constructed and made operative, systems theory responds by citing two different and complementary distinctions. On the one hand, the distinction between system and environment. Education is a subsystem of modern society whose function is to change society’s mental environment. Yet the fact that it is an environment means that pupils’ consciousness cannot be ‘reached’ by education. No educator can penetrate directly into their minds to change them. The only chance is to involve pupils in the communication processes that take place typically in the classroom, thus leaving their consciousness the freedom to elaborate what is happening and to react according to their own criteria. That is the only way to educate. In order to fulfil this function, education has to codify educative communication, using the pattern of conveyable/non-conveyable to refer to the knowledge and skills that can be taught, and the pattern of better/worse to evaluate pupils’ performance (Baraldi and Corsi 2017: 61 ff.). The first case is one of selecting knowledge, taking the characteristics of educative communication into account: not all the knowledge that is worth learning can be conveyed without any difficulties. It has to be selected and adapted to the pedagogical requirements of educative communication. The second case is one of monitoring the effects of education in the different forms that are made possible by interaction in the classroom and by the school’s organisation (praise/blame, marks, appraisals and examinations, culminating in qualifications and certificates). As time goes by, it is possible to monitor whether a pupil’s performance tends to improve or deteriorate. That is the only way that education can gather feedback about what it does.

On the other hand, systems theory has adopted the distinction between medium and form: to educate means to see the person being educated as a medium, in other words as a potential on which specific forms can be impressed. In fact, if education means changing that person, then we must suppose that the state of their consciousness changes in a way that can be controlled (not determined, of course!) in an educative manner. The educator ‘sees’ these potentials for change and projects them onto the pupil, trying to achieve them. What actually happens inside the pupil’s head inevitably remains invisible to the educator’s eye and this means that the potential (the medium) can be described as a pedagogical construct. Yet it is a construct that has effects. Systems theory thus identifies the educative medium as the child (Kind) and, more extensively, as the individual’s life course (Lebenslauf). What makes this approach original is certainly not the idea that education sets out to ‘change’ the individual, especially in the early phase of life (Vanderstraeten and Biesta 2006), but the concept, and so the theoretical approach, that allows for a sociological description of education, i.e. the concept of medium and the distinction that defines it: medium/form.

The medium ‘child’

When systems theory speaks about ‘child’ or about ‘life course’ as educational media, it uses this concept in a very specific way, one that is different from its conventional sociological use. ¹ Citing ideas developed in the psychology of perception (Heider 1959), Luhmann defines the concept of medium as a set of loosely coupled elements that can be coupled tightly together to produce forms that can be observed. The simplest example is that of a footprint in the sand: the sand takes on a specific form (the footprint), but if you move the sand and then place another foot on it, you can give it a different form. There are no particular bonds between the grains of sand, except for when they record the footprint, and that is the only time when we can observe something specific. What this tells us is that the medium remains invisible in its potential (loose coupling) and the only things that we can observe are the forms (tight coupling).

The proximity of this concept of education is self-evident: educating always means trying to change the person being educated in accordance with pedagogically permissible and practicable criteria. Without this possibility, without this presumption, education could not take place. Education thus always starts out from the given situation, in the sense that the person to be educated already has a form of his or her own (knowledge, skills, character, attitudes, behaviours, even prejudices or biases etc.), but it is supposed that this form is only one of a variety of others that are possible and can be recombined in different forms, at least to a certain extent, naturally in accordance with the intentions of the educator and the ‘malleability’ of the pupil.

That is why what we are dealing with is a particular form of communication media, which fulfil a specific function in the architecture of systems theory. We can call these media observational media. ² Their function is to give potential to reality, i.e. to see opportunities of intervention in things as they stand for generating forms (tight coupling) that would otherwise not exist (or at the very least this is what the observer has to suppose).

The medium child is then always no more than a projection of education: only an observer can see possibilities in what is as it is. On the other hand, nobody is a ‘child’ or an ‘adult’ per se – he/she is for those who see margins for intervention, options and possibilities of action. The child is an observational medium, a construct of an observer, an exclusive construct of education, which observes how the child observes, so as then to intervene if his/her world of experience is considered in need of correction. The educator assumes that this world of experience is quite loosely coupled, so as to impress forms on it, above all a specific form of knowledge.

But as the child is an individual, a psychic system, he/she is a black box, to borrow a concept from classical cybernetics, so is not transparent and cannot be determined from outside. ³ An educator can only observe the forms that the child adopts from time to time, but cannot get inside his/her head; yet he/she can presume that the child is actually something contingent, so unstable, continuously changing and potentially subject to irritation on the part of external interventions.

In practice, educators always have feedback about what they do, even though children’s autonomy and non-transparency are displayed in the fact that each one reacts in his/her own way. Autonomy is not an effect of education, then, as pedagogy is required to suppose, but the necessary condition for education to be possible.

The medium ‘life course’

Rather than enter into the details of the distinction between medium and form, I shall now continue to follow Luhmann’s reasoning. In part as a consequence of his discussions with Karl-Eberhard Schorr, ⁴ Luhmann eventually expressed the hypothesis that contemporary education can no longer be limited to the first phases of a human being’s life but must encompass his/her entire life course (Lebenslauf), including adulthood. The child is thus a sub-medium of the more general medium of the life course. We can suppose that the basis for this theoretical decision is the fact that education, like every other subsystem of society, tends to become universal, in the sense that nothing is excluded from the possibility and from the necessity of education, not even an adult human being. ⁵ Formulae that have become very common and been widely discussed in recent decades, such as ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘learning to learn’, should be seen in this context, moving differences in age out of the foreground into the middle distance.

Luhmann defines the life course as ‘a description that is drawn up during life and is revised when the need arises. . . The components of a life course comprise turning points when something happened that was not supposed to happen’ (Luhmann 2004 [1997]: 267). That is why a life course is not just a curriculum vitae, a description of the past: a life course must also include the future, despite the fact that it is still indeterminate, a future that on the one hand is anticipated in accordance with the intentions of education, but on the other is constructed as expectations related to the single individual. As a consequence, a life course is always individual, as it is a unique concatenation of occurrences, and that is why it is impossible to justify or explain it (Luhmann 2002a: 94). It is an observational medium which can only be narrated.

This concept of life course becomes more complex if we ask what forms can be impressed on it. The answer is knowledge (Luhmann 2004[1997]: 275 and 2002: 97 ff.). This does not signify that educating means cramming pupils’ heads with notions and skills, however much the way that schools and also universities operate often gives the impression of pursuing this trivialisation of consciousness (Cf. Von Foerster 1985: 43 ff.). What the life course is understood as is an articulation and co-ordination of knowledge that can be called up and used in unfamiliar or unexpected situations, including the knowledge that is necessary for us to admit that we do not know what to do or how to behave when something unexpected happens, without that necessarily making us look like simpletons. The educator can then check whether his/her expectations are confirmed or not and may then intervene if the need arises, both on the pupils, relying on their ability to learn, and on him/herself, by changing his/her expectations.

It is not the function of education to furnish each individual with a life course, however: that would not be education anymore, but an imposition without any alternatives, a ‘totalitarian’ education. The forms that a life course adopts as it progresses are specific to each individual and, however things go, the educator will always see his/her work confirmed. That is why Luhmann talks about self-fulfilling prophecies: knowledge (skills, abilities and professionalism) is necessary, as we would otherwise not know what we are doing, but education is based on its own frames, not on the knowledge that is taught. It is not a teleological programme (Luhmann 2004 [1997]: 270). What the educator observes, what interests him/her, is not simply a set of skills that can be used in one context or another, but the forms that the life course takes as the educational process develops, where every form paves the way for further possibilities to educate. Educating, in other words, means constructing options, possibilities and perspectives; it means working on the combinatory potential of the life course, but without identifying the life course with any specific objectives, because that would mean wanting to determine the future of the people being educated (Luhmann 2002a: 101). In the end, whatever approach is adopted to achieving it, each life course has to be accepted for what it is. ⁶

Following on this rather long summary, my aim is now to discuss in greater depth two issues that have been merely touched on in Luhmann’s work and in systems theory in general.

The first of these concerns the life course as a ‘narration’. Luhmann states that the semantic model of the life course is currently correlated with the diffusion of fictional literature brought about via printing and with the birth of the mass media (Luhmann 2004 [1997]: 271). In this sense, the life course is a rhetorical product ⁷ that first saw the light of day as a consequence of the dissolution of the traditional forms of representation in which the individuals’ destiny was linked directly to their social origin. In the process of progressing from stratification to functional differentiation as the primary structure of society, those forms of representation were replaced by the idea that the individual is not determined by his/her past and is capable of actively constructing his/her own future. In fact, the model for an idea of this kind comes first from printing and later from the mass media, including the more modern media: individuals’ lives are there to be filled, written and constructed looking towards a future that holds the door open. Education borrowed this approach and made it into a medium on which forms can be impressed. The questions that I am asking here are these: what opportunities and what problems arise in a society that has transformed its mass media so radically and so far with so little clarity in a mere handful of decades? What models of life course are being produced these days? To what extent are they compatible with education’s claim to give them a form, knowing that individuals observe how they are observed by education?

The second issue concerns the fact that the life course is in any case only the medium of education, while individuals live out their lives in the broader context of society as a whole. In addition to their education, they have their jobs, their families and all kinds of events and episodes taking place in the various subsystems of society. Education takes all this into account, of course, and at the same time must distinguish itself from it all. As a consequence, I raise the question of how the relationship between a life course as a medium of education and the individual’s ‘career’ is constructed.

Life courses and the competition of the mass media

The life course is a rhetorical scheme produced by the mass media. It has been known for some time that the models on whose basis biographies and life courses are structured are social products that have communications media to thank for being created, disseminated and stabilised. ⁸ The evolution of the mass media thus acts as an indicator of the variety and the quantity of such models, from which single individuals draw their inspiration in one way or another. Following on the novel, which held sway for a relatively long period of time as the sole benchmark by virtue of the invention of printing, other media have gradually made their debuts, expanding the range of possibilities. The sudden and very vigorous acceleration that came about in the second half of the nineteenth century and above all with effect from the opening decades of the twentieth brought the advent of increasingly sophisticated new remote communication technologies, derailing the rhetorical imagery typical of literary narrative. The cinema and also television, at least in the early stages of their development, can be supposed to have made a decisive contribution to the construction of a variety of ways of articulation of life courses. To come up to the present day, the worldwide web first and then the various kinds of media that are now available have clearly triggered an enormous expansion of what can be imagined as an individual’s existential path.

These were not just more or less plausible or practicable ‘compact’ models, as had been the case of the phenomenon of the diva in the earlier part of the twentieth century or of other public figures who made a major media impact. Above all in the golden age of the cinema, divas still preserved something of the characteristics and the aura of the heroes of ancient epics, an unachievable model of virtue and potential, which, for the very reason that it is unachievable, made the entire idea of imitating it or of aspiring to become it quite senseless. ⁹ Divas replaced virtue with the seductive attraction typical of their success, which could also be negative and even self-destructive, and which was still capable of exercising enticement on many people until just a few decades ago. ¹⁰ In more recent decades, the digital media have come to play a major role, with consequences that it is now still too early to evaluate satisfactorily. With regard to the issue under discussion here, these media can be presumed to increase exponentially the potential for constructing possibilities of life course, and to do so in two ways.

On the one hand, there is an increase in the variety of what an individual might be or have and digital and social media in particular probably make these possibilities not only visible, but also feasible and achievable (although whether this is only apparently so is of course open to discussion). On the other, there is also an increase in the range of possible identities that an individual can adopt at the same time, for example at home, at school or among circles of ‘friends’ or ‘followers’, in the echo chambers that tend to define and strengthen his or her representations of reality, the more they are discussed, criticised or opposed. ¹¹ Erving Goffman’s famous arguments about the presentation of the self (Goffman 1956) ought then to be radicalised, in reaction to the recent dominance of social media: the relationship between front stage and backstage is changing, as is the lowest common denominator of the identities that we construct on the web, and this poses the problem of sufficient coherence, which cannot always be solved by keeping the contexts where one identity is adopted and not another as separate from one another as possible (Hogan 2010: 383). ¹²

Exactly what type of reality is the one that is mediated by social media still remains rather unclear. It can be presumed, in any case, that it has become complicated for education to distinguish, in terms of evaluation, between the different representations of reality: teachers are destined to encounter ever-increasing difficulty when deciding what is good and what is bad in their echo chambers (Tække and Paulsen 2016: 37). A polarisation of the representations of the people being educated can also be expected, so also a tendency to resist attempted educational interventions (Sunstein 2002, on comparable effects in public opinion), possibly fuelled by individuals’ continuous efforts to achieve self-assurance and the integration of biography and life course (Kade 2005, 2011: 32, 49).

In this sense, the medium of the life course poses problems that are not actually so concerned with influences coming from the rest of society, eroding educators’ aspirations and restricting the possibilities for education to impose a life course as its own medium (Kade 2006: 20 ff.). The real problem might be down to the simple fact that education is always intentional (Luhmann 1992, 2002: 54 ff.), so it follows that the forms of life course to which educators aspire, regardless of the extent to which they are customised to suit the single individual whose collaboration is requested, are always ultimately forms that are produced by a pedagogic intention and that is how they are perceived (Vanderstraeten 2001).

This generates two orders of problems. The first comes from communication in its guise as a social operation: anyone, by virtue of being an ‘individual’, can distinguish between the information that is communicated and the expectations, associated with the information, that are aimed at the individual. ¹³ For this reason, the individual always has two possibilities for answering his/her interlocutors, questioning either what is being discussed (the information) or their intentions (expectations). This is a classical problem for education, as educational communication is based on the pedagogical intention and the persons being educated can resist both the knowledge that the educator is trying to transmit to them (either because it is of no interest to them or because they do not like it) and the very intention of changing them by educating (because they do not want to be what others would like them to be). Nobody can predict whether they will react and, if so, then how. Education solves this problem, at least in part and to an extent that is limited to the younger generations, by exploiting the peculiarities of interaction in the classroom, where it is impossible for individuals to escape the communication – and, if they want to refuse the pedagogical intention, they must do so by communicating (if it comes to that, also in the form of bullying, hooliganism or violence).

Non-institutional education constitutes a special case that has recently become important for the organisation of training and of certificates of education, as well as furnishing evidence of how the educational medium is extended to encompass the life course, so the individual’s entire life (Bjørnåvold 2000). The issue here is how to ensure that the educational system includes this kind of non-formal or informal learning, which may comprise various different kinds of experience, whether professional or personal or also promoted by educational institutions themselves (as in the case of MOOCs). From a sociological standpoint, however, a distinction must be drawn between learning that is ‘forced’ on people intentionally (education) and learning that takes place continuously in the course of every individual’s life (which we ought to call socialisation). Seen in this light, the issue becomes one of determining how education can certify ‘skills’ that it has not produced itself, but that it can recognise as compatible with its own perspectives; in addition, it is also an issue of how the individual reacts to the fact that some of his/her experiences are observed in this way. The solution may be to link official training and non-institutional learning together, so as to maintain a degree of control over how learning is evaluated.

On the subject of institutions, the second problem can be formulated as the loss of authority on the part of the institutions, including educational institutions. ¹⁴ The ‘legitimation’ of educational preferences has to be reproduced continuously and never taken for granted, all the more so nowadays, when the classical mass media have been joined by the digital media, making the preferences of pedagogy with regard to the forms adopted by life courses increasingly questionable. If we then consider the fact that ‘intensive’ educational curricula in practice monopolise a very long period of an individual’s life (from infancy to university), the difficulties involved in giving a ‘foundation’ to a life course are far from negligible. It may be that education is reacting by moving the onus of selection to an increasingly later stage (in particular with regard to certifying educational cycles), so as to avoid demotivating those undergoing education and to ensure that any difficulties encountered in the earlier phases do not prejudice the future of the individuals in question too much.

But from that individual’s point of view, regardless of education’s ability to legitimate itself, this problem remains: the life course is a medium onto which education sets out to impose its own forms, in other words the preferences and intentions of others. But the individual can and must look further than that, at the possibilities that are or will be open to him/her (or not, as the case may be) in his/her life course as a whole. And it is here that we encounter another area of theory.

Life courses and careers

The educational system does not encompass all the options that are open to individuals for constructing their prospects. As we have seen, the life course is a medium with which education observes each individual’s entire life, but in addition to education, the other subsystems at work in modern society are also of varying degrees of importance for planning future scenarios and for retracing and appraising what has been done in the past. At some stage sooner or later in our lives, we all have dealings with the economy to find work, with families if we intend to set one up ourselves, with politics if we vote, with law when we have rights to defend or are punished for certain forms of behaviour and so on. In other words, if we consider an individual’s entire life, we have to go further than education, however important it is in conditioning what we can make of ourselves.

Career

Sociology has studied this issue from multiple vantage points, for example from the standpoint of the relationship between the individual and society and from that of the difference between inclusion and exclusion. Systems theory has gone about this by proposing the concept of career. This is not a new concept, but one that had previously been applied more than anywhere else to describe particular careers with a tendency to have a negative connotation, such as the career of the prison inmate, of the criminal or of outsiders. ¹⁵ Luhmann suggests extending the relevance of the career to encompass considering it as the primary and generalised form of social inclusion (Luhmann 1989: 231 ff.).

The concept of career is of interest to us here because it has a lot in common with the life course, despite the fact that it does not coincide with it. Like a life course, a career is constructed along a chronological axis, as it comprises a series of events, of stages, of thresholds and of turning points that connect up with each other in more or less articulated and complex ways. In particular

• a) Every event that furnishes a milestone in a career marks a difference between the past and the future, between before the event and after, a difference that makes a difference. That milestone may be a school or university qualification or the moment of entering (or being dismissed from) employment, but it may also be a marriage or the beginning of a new personal relationship, an unexpected positive or negative chance occurrence and so on;

• b) The events in a career are produced as a combination of the decisions made by the individual in question and of decisions made by others, in other words of self-selection and heteroselection: any role requires a candidacy (self-selection) and its positive or negative evaluation (heteroselection), not only in organisations, but also in families, for example (if you want to get married, your partner has to agree with your proposal. . .);

• c) Every event also makes a difference in terms of evaluation, in accordance with such criteria as positive/negative or improvement/deterioration, including cases of motionlessness, in other words careers that do not move and leave the individual in the situation where he or she was before, or of self-exclusion, in which the individual decides not to run any risks.

The life course and the career also have a specific form of circularity in common. This is what systems theory, referring to Spencer Brown, calls ‘re-entry’: both contain themselves, in the sense that they are reviewed, evaluated and reconsidered in every event that constitutes them, thus generating a constant redescription of the past and the future, which in turn furnishes the pattern in which the life course and the career are filled with contents, thus carving out a distinct, autonomous space for themselves. When we start a new job, for example, we reconsider our past (it was worthwhile taking that qualification after all) and our future (discovering that we now have ambitions that were previously inconceivable); or, to quote the celebrated study by Goffman (1961), when we step over the threshold of a hospital, we become patients and our past and future are rewritten as the cause of our pathology and the prospects we have of being cured and leaving the hospital.

Yet, as I said before, the two concepts do not coincide. But where is the difference?

Life course

This question could be answered by saying that a person’s life course is his/her career as observed from the standpoint of education. The unique articulation of the difference between past and future that distinguishes a career becomes a life course when education projects possibilities of educational intervention onto it. As long as the person is a child, the medium of education only encompasses the start-up phase of his/her career; but from the moment when it is the life course that acts as the medium, the individual’s entire career can be observed by education, meaning that whatever stage or position that career reaches, at whatever age, education will have something to say.

Life course and career nevertheless remain distinct: the possibilities of intervention that are open to education do not coincide with career prospects. For example, if the economy is incapable of guaranteeing sufficient jobs, the resulting unemployment can be transformed into an opportunity for training. The absence of practicable work prospects (career), however temporary, may become an opportunity to create training prospects (life course). Or, if an individual’s advanced age no longer allows for future scenarios that are more or less rich in opportunities, education can step in with training for the elderly – although there is certainly room for discussion as to whether this can also still be construed as fully fledged education.

The life course, then, is always constructed under what could be described as the ‘jurisdiction’ of education, so is always observed (by both parties, the educator and the person being educated) through the lens of pedagogical intention. That is why education has a different meaning, according to whether it is perceived from the standpoint of the life course or from that of the career: the presumption that the learning process opens doors that the pupil can then exploit and would otherwise not have available turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (Luhmann 2004 [1996]: 274), as it cannot be verified ‘on the spot’, in scholastic or other forms of educational or training interactions, nor can it be refuted by the destinies of the individuals in question, whatever directions their careers take. ¹⁶ This kind of vantage point is something that the career does not have. To be sure, the career is also observed through the lens of criteria of evaluation, as a success or a failure, for example, and can certainly also be observed as a destiny that could not have developed in any other way. But it cannot be observed in the same sense as education: there is no intention that directs it and provides correction as the need arises.

Reducing and amplifying differences

The specific nature of the life course as compared to the career can also be discerned in how the differences between the people being educated are managed: regardless of the position in which the person being educated finds him/herself, the differences of learning and of evaluation that gradually come about are only acceptable from a pedagogical point of view if they are produced by education. This can be seen clearly in the values most typically espoused by modern pedagogy: equality and quality (or excellence), which can be construed as a pre-selection of programmes for reducing and for amplifying differences.

The pedagogical concept of equality has a dual significance: projected outwards, it indicates indifference towards the differences between the people being educated (due mostly to family socialisation, status and so on). ¹⁷ Everyone starts school at the same age. This does not mean that these differences are of no relevance to education: it only means that they have to be neutralised or compensated for if they are considered to be prejudicial. Projected inwards, equality means that everyone follows the same didactic programmes and is subjected to the same methods of evaluation, and if differences emerge that cannot be attributed to commitment or ability, an attempt is then made to compensate for them. Seen in this light, ‘equality’ means trying to reduce ‘unwelcome’ differences, and this puts this value in the vicinity of the cybernetic concept of steering (Luhmann 1997 [1988]).

The pedagogical concept of quality, or excellence, meanwhile, refers to the amplification of pedagogically acceptable differences. What we call ‘talent’ should be exploited, individuals’ potential should be stimulated and brought to realisation as much as possible. Any limits set on this amplification are only acceptable if they can be externalised, i.e. if they can be attributed to factors that education cannot control or can only control to a limited extent (classically, this is the case of commitment and ability).

From this standpoint, education oriented to the medium of the life course seems to fulfil a function of conditioning (of the conditions) of the career, in other words, of a limitation and at the same time of amplifying possibilities. Without this possibility to see potential in the factual reality of the person being educated, there would be no medium and so no education either. But this potential is the work of the observer and of education, something that is conveyed by the fact that the conditioning of what is possible is in turn conditioned differently in the career: what counts as a success for education, such as managing to educate a very high percentage of the population for a long period of time, if not throughout people’s lives (in other words the life course), may be only relatively relevant to the career. And that is not to mention the possibility of careers that are ‘negative’ or that cannot be allotted to standard categories (criminals, counter-cultural artists, outsiders, etc.), which ought not to be taken as pedagogical models, despite being careers.

The two concepts are thus different, as is also evident in empirical terms, considering that life courses are subject to quite different conditions from those that apply to careers: in the case of education, for example, it is not a question of occupying organisational positions (jobs) that are created by the economy (the jobs market) and are thus scarce (Luhmann 2002a: 71). The selection of human resources in companies applies thoroughly different criteria compared to the forms of evaluation applied to students going through the system of education. It would make no sense to treat unemployment as a failure of education (or employment as a success), however much it may also reflect on education policies as a social problem.

If the difference between life course and career that we have attempted to outline is plausible, we must next ask ourselves what links them together? What enables us to translate the results achieved by education into results and prerequisites of a career?

Selection

In order to answer this question, we can return to the reasoning used at the outset. Acting through its media of child and life course, and the knowledge with which it impresses forms, education sets out to construct a potential for situations and eventualities that may arise in the future, so are still unknown in the present. We take for granted that students learn and so change, but there is no way of verifying this directly. Also from a didactic standpoint, the knowledge that education draws in from the outside world (especially from science) or that it constructs for itself, is chosen because it is knowledge that is proven, whereupon the attempt is made to adapt it as far as possible to make it suitable for being conveyed to students (whether young or mature). But how do we know this?

If it were just for its function, education would find itself ‘travelling blindly’, without knowing whether what it is doing is at all effective, whether it makes any sense or whether it is suitable for its audience of students. It ought to be added here that the students would face the same conundrum, as it is not enough merely to read the textbooks, listen to the lessons or take part in didactic events of one kind or another: knowledge also has to be elaborated. As education cannot follow the changes taking place in the heads of the students, it has to rely on its own devices, and it does this in two ways. On the one hand, it organises in-class interaction in accordance with typical criteria: didactic programmes to be followed step by step and synchronisation of the progress made in training with the age of the students and so on. On the other hand, education has to make use of another approach for observing those it is educating: the approach of selection (in its many forms). This is one of the most controversial questions in pedagogy and the ‘sciences’ of education. Selection has always been an uncomfortable bedfellow, when it has not been downright harmful, and one that is in any case tolerated with ill-will and subjected to continuous discussion, for reasons that are understandable: however it is conducted, selection cannot guarantee ‘objectivity’ and impartiality, not only because it is inconceivable that a pupil’s state of learning can be simply ‘photographed’, as that pupil is a closed box, an utterly opaque, inaccessible psychic system. But the problem is also that selection creates a dimension of its own that it is arduous to define as educational in the strict sense. A written or oral examination lasts for a rather short time that is then translated into differences of evaluation on a scale that ranges from better to worse, and in this short time conditions are created that are well known and not always easy to manage: tension, drama, emotions and learning that is ‘rerouted’ towards the ability to score good marks and away from the didactic contents and so on.

Quite apart from these specific aspects of selection in education, however, the point that is important here is that, without selection, education would be indeterminate and impossible to plan. In fact, if educating implies that there must be a pedagogical intention, then it is naturally inevitable that educators constantly ask themselves whether what happens in interactive communication in the classroom and in their pupils’ heads corresponds to that intention. Selection, in other words, is not a body extraneous to education, nor is it a ‘necessary evil’ to be endured and compensated for when it has undesired or unintended side effects (effects that should actually be attributed to education itself). Selection is simply the flipside of education, without which we would lose sight of the essential meaning of what is being done, of the educational objectives and of the quality of the training. In other words: education and selection are one and the same thing.

On the other hand, the life course also includes evaluations and the reason why it includes them is because education and selection converge inevitably: when pupils get a bad grade in an examination, they will wonder what went wrong, whether it was a question of insufficient commitment on their part, of their difficulty in learning certain subjects, of learning methods that do not suit them or that were simply applied badly and so on. In any case, they will tend to reappraise the combinatory approaches they apply to their learning – or they may lay the blame on factors external to themselves (the inability of their teachers, difficult situations they find themselves in and so on).

All of this has variable relevance for the career. Scholastic evaluations that are limited to interaction in the classroom (praise or blame, good grades or bad) are forgotten and do not prejudice a career. What is important, on the other hand, are the selections made on an organisational level, i.e. the qualifications, diplomas and certificates in general that officially conclude cycles of education, summarising them both within and outside the organisation (the school or then university). At this level, education adapts to the other subsystems, especially to the economy, distinguishing between qualifications and other diplomas that can be used in due course based on criteria for selection in the job market. Here we come across decisions that contribute to the development of a career, regardless of the direction it takes. ¹⁸ Selection has then a function that is internal to education, as we have seen, while at the same time being of service to structuring the career by creating some opportunities and excluding others. ¹⁹

Certificates are suitable for managing the problem that is shared by the life course and the career, that of the uncertainty of the future, which translates more tangibly into the problem of not knowing which past will be of use in the future (cf. Kneer 1998). In fact, these forms of documented and certified selection operate as time-binding structures: they inform us about what has been done and enable us to capitalise on it (Treanton 1960), so as to keep it available for condensation in specific forms (candidatures, acknowledgement of skills, etc.) should the need arise. These are forms that both limit and at the same time expand what can be expected (a graduate in engineering will not practise as a lawyer, but will have higher expectations than anyone who has not taken a higher education qualification), so are also ‘instructive’ on both sides: for education, which can deduce indications from careers about how to structure formalised educational curricula, and for individuals, who can calibrate their decisions on the basis of a variety of indicators that can be constructed around their qualifications and certificates (employment prospects and the calculation of risks, but also the identification of specific interests). All this takes place in spite of mass education, which has now been pushed as far as university level, creating specific problems, such as the fact that academic qualifications are now necessary because everyone has them – and they are useless for the same reason. The difference between the life course and the overall individual career is once again clearly visible here: getting an academic qualification may be considered to be an educational success, both for the issuing authority and for the individual who receives it, but its value in terms of the selections made in the labour market remains questionable. To this should also be added a relatively recent problem, created by the mass media and already hinted at above: the consistency and compatibility between the many forms that the life course, seduced by the mass media, can take on today and what is practicable (i.e. can be included) as a career in our contemporary society. But that calls for specific research that is beginning to appear in specialised literature.

Conclusions

The concept of the life course is interesting not only for what it indicates, i.e. the transformation of an individual’s entire life into pedagogical potential, regardless of the direction taken by his/her career. It is also interesting for its prerequisites, as it is possible to hypothesise that education extended its medium from the child to the life course when it had to come to terms with the fact that individuals (as psychic systems and consciousness) are utterly autonomous, unpredictable, opaque and so indeterminable.

Although this historical novelty can be analysed from multiple vantage points, I shall limit this to two questions of sociologically primary importance on this occasion. From the first vantage point, the issue under consideration is the ‘discovery of the child’ (Ariès 1960): among many other things, modernity has also introduced the fact that every individual is an observer, with an autonomous view of the world, even as a child. While infancy used to be considered to be something of an antechamber to adulthood, making children devoid of the ability of discernment (i.e. of observation), they are now considered to be individuals with their own needs, requirements, abilities and, of course specific potential, all of which calls for guidance. The second vantage point refers to another historical and evolutionary change: the invention of the modern individual. This change can be described in terms of time, i.e. as a passage from a definition of individuals based on their birth (the past) to one based on their performance (in the future), so on their career.

These two vantage points are clearly complementary. If an individual’s destiny is the product of his/her decisions (among other things), then it no longer makes any sense to consider infancy as a sort of state of nature. Nor does it make any sense any more to restrict education’s remit to infancy, because the individual, with every decision he/she makes, always reproduces a potential that has to be managed. That is why the career and the life course are complementary: each individual constructs his/her own career, for better or for worse, and education transforms each ‘segment’ of that career into pedagogically relevant opportunities. ²⁰ The meaning of the decisions that each individual makes is different when seen from these two vantage points: getting an academic qualification or achieving a professional one are goals that education is supposed to consider in a positive light, regardless of the consequences they will have on the individual’s career. So we may wonder whether it is ‘rational’ to subject individuals to many years of school and university education, running the risk of demotivating them or of ‘stressing’ them excessively; or whether the tendency to certify an increasingly extensive variety of activities, also later on in life, will end up making the pedagogical meaning of the life course less and less transparent, and so also the influence it exerts on how the individual’s career develops. Opening up to forms of knowledge that are not typical of more traditional education is probably inevitable, although we must expect to encounter difficulties in giving those forms of knowledge a minimum of consistency and compatibility with the pedagogical goals of education.

In terms of institutions and organisations (schools and universities), this kind of problem can be identified, for example, in the increasingly marked tendencies towards formalising school and university curricula and bureaucratising the work done by teachers that have been compounded in Europe by the reforms enacted in recent decades. ²¹ The advantages of many innovations of this kind, such as the international comparability of curricula and qualifications, student and teacher mobility, the modularity of training courses and much more besides, is beyond discussion. In general, we could talk about an increase in the potential for combination, in other words of the possibilities to choose and of the ‘transparency’ of what is on offer as educational opportunities.

From a complementary standpoint, however, this also implies greater risks and a greater decision-making burden, i.e. less transparency rather than more (especially in the case of possible future developments). This is not just a matter of concerns about the career, which education not only cannot attenuate, but probably actually contributes to sharpening: the more opportunities become available in the life course, the more uncertainty is created. The problem here might be that these concerns have an impact on decisions, because the related risks are perceived in the present and that increases the tension between the life course and the career and in general between the many forms of individual identity in search of coherence. ²² In fact, while educational interventions are always targeted and intentionally planned, a career is much more radically a sequence of chance occurrences that generates its own order, ²³ something that makes it far more difficult to govern. The rhetoric and the narratives nourished by the mass media describe an increasingly extensive variety of life courses, but the career follows its own paths, with opportunities and uncertainties that are only partly correlated with what education can offer to individuals. The fact that education is now a necessary precondition for constructing a career does not mean that careers depend on education to develop opportunities. That is why we asked ourselves how individuals construct themselves, observing how they are observed by education by means of the life course.

Age is one important factor. Individuals are born, grow up and then age. For some time now, the old forms of the life course, arranged in standardised sequences, have dissolved (for men, they were school, military service, a job, marriage, children, career promotions, if possible, and retirement). Career and the life course were strongly integrated and any potential deviations were subject to judgement, including moral judgement: people expected to enjoy greater freedom when they were young and to conform increasingly as they grew older, once again drawing their inspiration for this from the media (television, cinema and literature). It is hard to say how things stand today. Thresholds that are particularly significant or demanding in our lives are moved backwards and forwards from one generation to another and certainly also on the basis of the problems and the opportunities that arise. Procreation, which is also a biological issue for a woman, is a good example: is it better to put off childbearing, so as to have time to build a professional career, or to get it done early, so that you have more freedom later on in life, when you can expect your children to have become independent? But there is also the more radical choice: to have children or not? And what issues arise in the case of education? Things have changed since a few decades ago: we no longer talk about cooling out our expectations (Clark 1960, referred specifically to women; Goffman 1952). On the contrary, we now seek to warm them up and diversify them for everyone.

We are at the point where several subsystems come together: the economy, which must take these developments (such as an inflation of academic qualifications) into account when recruiting staff; education, which may well be happy enough if those qualifications are unlikely to be discriminating factors for individuals’ futures; the family, which is adapting to conditions that have changed substantially in just a few decades (much less stable bonds of personal affection, whether and when to have children, sufficient disposable income and so on). This does not mean that families will disappear (on the contrary!), nor that the economy will stop recruiting people, nor that education will have difficulty finding opportunities to intervene in life courses. ²⁴ The problem, if there is one, is one of how and where individuals can identify possibilities and evaluate them in perspective. An evaluation calls for combining both opportunities and risks with every possibility. Young people tend to overestimate the opportunities and underestimate the risks. Different subsystems also anticipate the future differently: while the economy is used to calculating a variety of scenarios, which means it also takes the riskier ones into account, education could be said to tend to encourage optimism, focusing on the opportunities and leaving the riskiness of certain ambitions of pupils to informal evaluations. Would it be feasible to postulate something along the lines of a ‘risk education’, referring to the life course and the career? What kind of knowledge could be used viably? And what didactic tools would it employ?

The role of the media also seems to have changed. The variety of models available as inspiration for a life course appears to be not only greater, but also more widely varied, especially with regard to ‘age groups’. The self-image pieced together by an adolescent who makes him/herself available to the observation of an increasingly extensive and unpredictable audience is now the subject of concern and criticism. ²⁵ Not that this is a new phenomenon: we have known for some time now that it is difficult (maybe impossible) to juggle our way through a world where the only way to be unique is to follow models, the most common of which is the one that lays claim to ‘uniqueness’; and that we can only do so by ensuring that we are observed, without being able to control who is doing the observing. It may well be that social media enable and oblige us to indulge in an unprecedented ‘public’ visibility, with consequences that may also be problematic (such as cyberbullying, self-display that provokes comments and appraisals, often with very negative consequences, and so on). But that does not mean that everything becomes public or that the ‘private’ individual dimension is invaded. ²⁶ Individuals remain individuals, i.e. observers who are constantly reprocessing their world of experiences, which also includes how they themselves are observed. To use a metaphor, the public domain generated by the media functions a bit like a mirror (White 1981) that reflects both the one who is acting and the ones who display themselves (even just by posting comments as followers of some influencer or another). But the mirror only functions because it is not transparent: behind it are individuals and there, we can imagine, is where the question is asked ‘whose life is it anyway?’ – a question that remains unanswered.

Whether, to what extent and how they are capable of managing the endless possibilities that are available today (above all thanks to the mass media, as we have seen) is something that cannot be forecast. The many skills that are taught and learned these days could also include this one: how to manage the potential for combinations? As in the case of the ars combinatoria that was first discussed in the early days of the modern era, the issue is that of working with a dual reality: we can have anything or be anything, but we cannot have and be anything at the same time.