Socialization and education in Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems
The subject of the article is the theory of autopoietic systems, developed by the German sociologist and pedagogue Niklas Luhmann, at present one of the most interesting and most bearing variants of the general theory of systems. Luhmann understands the society not as an assemblage of people, but as an operative closed process of communication. Such an attitude sometimes wakes controversies because of its radical functional-cybernetic character of the theory and the terms applied e.g. a man as a non-trivial machine. Contemporarily, the theory of autopoietic systems has been developed and modified in form of specific applications for social analyses in sociology and pedagogics. In the article, the possibilities and ways of pedagogical working in such a specifically comprehended social reality are showed and discussed critically. The paper consists of five parts: Education as a kind of communication among autopoietic mental systems; Education and sociology; Code of education; Child as a medium of education; Technology of education.