Context is a notion Niklas Luhmann only uses sporadically and when it comes to education, he draws on the term almost exclusively to describe the close link between socialisation and its immediate setting. Socialisation is considered to be context-dependent and when such socialisation occurs within the settings of the family, context becomes a shorthand for the household, usable to indicate one’s descent (Herkunftskontext). In school education, on the contrary, it is the classroom that articulates the primary context for interaction. The shared physical presence of teachers and pupils in class, so Luhmann’s sociology of education, constitutes the cornerstone of modern education. Through their interaction in the secluded classroom, modern education obtains the autonomy to formulate its own language or logic as a system sui generis. 

In this contribution, I shall focus on the exclusionary movement that accompanies such system formation. Taking cues from Michel Serres’ parasitology, I propose to rethink the differences of context between the household and school as interferences or perturbations of a system that undermine its normal or aspired operativity. The attempt to exclude such disturbance – the expulsion of the so-called parasite – has accordingly to be considered as the constitutive moment for the formation of the education system. On basis of such characterisation, I then turn to contemporary examples of transnational and digital education. Both examples show emergent  forms of education that roam far beyond the national project of mass schooling. The global scope of such education, I shall argue, hinges on their ability to successfully re-formalise education, thus on its capacity to draw new borders by exorcising the formal traits of classroom instruction.

This is a theoretical contribution, written for the section on Systems Theory in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Education and Globalization. It examines Niklas Luhmann's oeuvre and takes a particular interest in his understanding of rationality. The latter being a divergent reformulation of Max Weber's goal rationality, I take up his notion of systemic rationality to tease out the rationale of educational change. By exploring crosslinks with the writings of Michel Serres on the figure of the parasite and weaving additional ties with evolutionary biology and adjacent concepts of French post-structuralism, the contribution engages in what Pierre Bourdieu once called "fieldwork in philosophy", so as to come to a better sociological understanding of the newly emerging forms of education.

The contribution's primary goal is to provide an accessible entry to Niklas Luhmann's sociology of education and its understanding of organisational change. At the same time, it builds on his work to articulate an original, counter-intuitive perspective on recent developments in education, more particularly the transnational projectification stimulated by European policy-making and the surging platformisation brought forth by digital technology. The aim, then, is to arrive at a theoretically innovative and empirically operationalisable conceptualisation that avoids easy moralising -- that is not merely interested in passing judgement, be it condemnation or praise.

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