Europe’s reliance on 'soft law’ to govern education is usually explained by political necessity. The lack of direct, legislative power in educational matters and the need to by-pass national sovereignty are then put forward as reason for Europe’s governance without a government. While acknowledging both factors, our contribution wants to add another explanans.

Our argumentation starts from the observation of some semantic shifts within the educational system. The decline of pedagogical ideals that normatively appreciated and canonised a specific body of knowledge (such as the German notion of Bildung or the French culture générale) and their gradual replacement by the formula of learning has been widely observed (among many others Luhmann & Schorr, 2000). It is our hypothesis that learning, as a means to deal with a future deemed uncertain, developed into a strongly symbolic norm, that appeals equally to non-educational realms, such as policy, to reprogram their ambitions cognitively. Europe’s governance instruments, such as the Open Method of Coordination, Comitology or the rising importance of comparative indicators, can then be observed as an instance of political appropriation of learning as a norm.

We argue therefor that learning emerges within the educational system as a function-specific norm and turn this observation into a theoretical hypothesis that sees learning as a no longer exclusively educational and therefor function-transcending norm, whose semantics are able to program European governance structures cognitively.

As such, Europe’s governance seems to both confirm and reaffirm its semantics of the knowledge society, by which a general preference for cognitive, rather than normative structures of expectations is expressed and ultimately normativised. 

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