The paper intends to explore in what sense the school is the chronotope of transition, the latter being understood as a way of coming to terms with the risks of inter-generational ruptures implicit in any generational passage. This mission comes the more to the fore when major revolutions happen in the world of the media and of communication technologies.

I will take my cue from Peter Sloterdijk (2014a, p. 8), who has pointed out how, precisely when they invented the school and discovered pedagogy, the Greeks realized “that the older and the younger generation cannot understand each other. The school has something to do with this.” In this view, the school should be construed as a device of the domestication of dis-continuity. Where an unbridgeable gulf risks opening up, due to  generational change, the school contributes to managing dis-continuity by turning it into a transition as a mediated change. This work is mediated by a knowledge, which, as Bertrand Stiegler (2008, p. 127) puts it, “organizes the inter-generational relations.”

In order to investigate this dynamics, one more element should be mentioned: the emergence of the invention of the school was coeval with the major shift from orality to literacy (Havelock, 1963, 1981, 1986). In this sense, the incomprehension between the older and the younger generation was interwoven with a technological revolution. In Stiegler’s wake we can state that the organization of inter-generational relations occurs thanks to what he—in the wake of Plato—calls hypomnemata (=supports for memory), that is, technologies that make a heritage possible. As the place of transition in the domestication of dis-continuity, the school has also been, therefore, a device to manage ‘memory’ by organizing the hypomnemata in order to make the inter-generational dialogue take place in the medium of knowledge.

We are now experiencing a similar challenge with the emergence of new media and the consequent revolution in the hypomnemata, which seem to threaten to ruin any inter-generational continuity. With an extreme simplification we can identify two major (and opposite) educational strategies, which attempt to cope with this situation.

On the one hand, authors like Mark Prensky (2010, p. 100) have been insisting on the fact that in the contemporary school “it is the students’ job – not the teacher’s – to use whatever technology is available.” The peril of this kind of approach is that, instead of being a “partnering” (as it would aspire to be), it turns out to be a sort of ‘division of labour,’ which ends up ratifying the separation between the generations, due to the emergence of the new media.

On the other hand, there are authors like Postman (1979) and his 'heirs', whose homeostatic approach, based on the idea of “teaching as a conserving activity,” aims at countering the irruption of the hidden curriculum of the new media by drawing upon the logic of the book-oriented media and risks, accordingly, sanctioning the experience of the school as a world apart, from which many students feel alienated.

After depicting this thematic constellation, the paper explores how both approaches risk not “organizing the hypomnemata” and, accordingly, dooming to failure the project of the school as the place of inter-generational dialogue and transition. By elaborating on some of Stiegler’s tenets the paper indicates, instead, what “an organization of the hypomnemata” could mean and how this implies the establishing of a real inter-generational dialogue in which the ‘domestication of dis-continuity’ is rather understood as the building of a ‘house’ where the tensionality implicit in the dis-continuity can productively ‘feel at home.’

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