Education: thE nEw and thE up-to-datE In a speech given in Barcelona, "La escuela, el invento más fatídico de la historia" ("The school, the most fateful invention in history"), the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk highlighted how at the same time as they invented the school and discovered pedagogy, the Greeks became aware "that the older and the younger generation cannot understand each other. School has something to do with this." 1 Indeed, school should be construed as that device which endeavors to counter the process of dis-continuation (that is, of a break in the continuity) due to generational passage: "since Socrates and Plato there have been from 60 to 80 generational changes. In each generational change the whole process could be destroyed and, actually, this has happened in different occasions, and the need for a laborious restoration of it has, accordingly, obtained. This process has kept a semblance of continuity. But actually there is no continuity." 2The permanent risk of dis-continuity will turn into "an open break of continuity" in the twentieth century because there is "a very modern cult, based upon the rejection to continue to do things as they have been done up to the current date." 3 This approach leads Sloterdijk to contrast dis-continuity with tradition, the latter occurring "when educators are so strong that they are able to cause an educational Stockholm syndrome in [the] terrible children. These children, therefore, end up identifying themselves with their teachers and fathers and take on their arguments. This is the tradition." 4 I have gerrymandered these quotations, which are included in a grander narrative about the enfants terribles, that is, those who balk at the burden of continuity and of tradition and who are the real protagonists of Western history, after the French Revolution and the epic deeds of Napoleon, which have constituted a major and unbridgeable hiatus. 5 In consequence of the latter, "all generations … run the risk of perilous and harmful mutations to an incomparably wider extent than their forebears." 6 We could interpret these remarks also as the diagnosis of a radicalization of a phenomenon, which Georg Simmel was ready to spot as early as 1918, when he noticed that the "usual" conflict of the culture was becoming increasingly serious. 7 Indeed, in Simmel's view, the fact that the creative life cannot but become embodied in (cultural) forms, which are, though, immediately experienced as inadequate by life itself in its incessant creativity, is intrinsic in the dynamics of culture, so that culture and life are doomed to engage in incessant strife. But this dynamic was attaining a new level, Simmel highlighted, insofar as the modern wo/man did not have to come to terms only with the struggle between the old cultural forms becoming lifeless and the new, emerging forms filled by the creative life, but, rather, in that they had to face an unprecedented situation, namely that the principle of form itself was under