ABSTRACT

This chapter illustrates how educational praxis and theories have been transformed throughout the 20th century by the necessity to take into consideration temporal discontinuity as a specific form of disorder contributing to their organization. It considers the activity of learning itself, the temporal features that characterize respectively the evolution of vocational education (alternance), the relationship between formal and informal education and the temporal dimensions inherent to one’s existence as they get translated through life histories. Throughout the 19th century, the genesis of industrial time contributed to the regularization of working conditions, the division of labor and the exercise of new forms of temporal discipline. This emerging order contributed to the reorganization of the entire rhythm of western societies, influencing deeply other temporalities, such as those shaping religious, family or personal life. Conceiving education as an ongoing process, unfolding through formal and informal spaces and times at every age of life has consequences that go far beyond curricular and organizational preoccupations.