ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of the school as suspended between the book era and the emerging screen era by focusing on the notions of the ‘historical tradition’ and the ‘classic,’ which are arguably pivotal in the school as an institution connected to the book culture. It focuses on the idea of ‘the classic’ and on the specific historicist inflection of this notion, and explores whether and how it should be revisited in the light of the new technological constellation dominated by the screen. The only real overcoming is the void left behind by the beheading as the abandonment of the question of the filling and/or making of the head through the downloading of knowledge into the memory of electronic devices and the possibility of its constant retrieval and visualization on the screen. The upshot is that knowledge ‘becomes something that is fundamentally outside itself’ and, accordingly, manageable and manipulable.
