Call for papers
11, 1 (2026)

Technology and Education
The relationship between technology and education is one of the topoi of philosophical thought since its Greek origins. If the human being is, paraphrasing Sloterdijk, the eminently technical animal, who lives by domesticating itself, then education is the technology of its self-production and cultural reproduction. In the fifth century BCE, techne becomes the model of human formation: it is through techne that the human being distinguishes itself from the animal and wrests its life from the arbitrariness of tyche. To educate means to form a technites: an expert capable of acting with competence and judgment in his own sphere. Aristocratic paideia does not transmit abstract rules but forms dispositions — one becomes “good” only through the exercise of goodness, through the company of those who are already good, just as one becomes a physician or a strategist only through the living and situated practice of one’s art. It is precisely this conception of education as practical knowledge that Plato, and then Aristotle, call into question by fostering a new concept of techne grounded in universal principles, opening the rift between education and technology that runs through the entire subsequent history of pedagogical thought. Medieval scholasticism traverses this tension by developing, on the one hand, specific educational technologies such as lectio and disputatio, and on the other, bending them to the “heteronomous” demand of reconciling faith and reason.
This rift becomes explicit only when the relationship between technology and formation loses the compactness of a hendiadys and becomes open tension. The Kantian paradox is its most precise modern formulation: the human being is the only creature that must be educated, and yet education is a gradual process of emancipation whose stages are anomie, heteronomy,and autonomy — a process played out on the border between the imposition of form and the realisation of freedom. Hegel reworks this tension in the dialectic of Bildung, in which the subject emancipates itself from naturalness, alienates itself from itself, and finally recognises itself in the state as spiritual totality. It is Foucault who brings the contradiction between technology, formation and freedom to its most radical formulation: educational institutions are themselves dispositifs — spatial, temporal and normative technologies for the production of docile and useful subjects, whose genealogy intertwines with the sanatorium, the hospital, the barracks, and the factory floor. The fact that education has always also been a technology does not dissolve the question: it radicalises it. And Foucault’s diagnosis acquires further precision in the present, in the era of neoliberal society and digital surveillance, in which those dispositifshave integrated with digital platforms, mechanisms of control have become algorithms, and generative artificial intelligence is replacing the teacher.
Does something like education still exist today? Is it possible to think of it as a technology of cultivating the human that is not mere vocational training? When the screen has replaced the page and the platform the school, we must ask whether what persists under the name of “education” still belongs to some recognisable humanist inheritance, or whether it has become something merely procedural — something for which we have no name yet. And yet Foucault himself, in the final years of his research, had identified in Greco-Roman antiquity an unexpected counter-analysis: at its centre stands the concept of epimeleia heautou and the technologies of the self — operations through which individuals act on their body, their soul, their mode of being, to transform themselves. It is on this terrain that Pierre Hadot moves, showing how the philosophical works of antiquity were not systems of propositions but spiritual exercises: practices of radical transformation of being that engage imagination, sensibility and will. If the Heideggerian lesson conceived modern technology, the culmination of a metaphysics of calculation, as Gestell — an imposition that reduces knowledge to classifiable information and the human to available Bestand (standing-reserve) — or, we might say with Gary Becker’s expression, the student to human capital — Stiegler’s pharmacology reminds us that technology also carries within itself the possibility of a counter-dispositif. The question is whether education can still be the site of this counter-movement.
Beyond the European tradition, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives have shown that the history of education-as-technology is also a history of violence: the missionary school, the literacy campaigns and “Christianisation” as instruments of cultural expropriation and epistemic erasure. As Fanon, Wynter and Mignolo have argued, Bildung is a sociogenic process that shapesa determinate figure of the “human,” whose formation has been achieved at the price of the dehumanisation of others. Educational technologies, like all technologies, are not neutral: they reproduce and realise the asymmetries of the societies in which they are embedded. Other traditions have instead attempted to think of education as the co-constitution of world, self and community: from Illich’s deschooling to Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, from Simondon’sphilosophy of technical individuation to Haraway’s situated knowledges, from the pedagogies of Dewey, Vygotsky and Piaget, to phenomenological pedagogy and the 4E approach. In this light, the nexus between technology and education reopens the most ancient questions: what does it mean to care for the becoming of the other? How are the person and the citizen formed? What meaning can we give to our inhabiting and shaping of the world? How do technologies structure and restructure learning?
Faced with a question so broad and urgent, the framework outlined here can only serve as an indicative trajectory. This issue of Mechane welcomes contributions that critically address the nexus between technology, technologies and education along the following lines of inquiry:

Contributions are welcome in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish. Interested authors are invited to submit a short abstract (max. 500 words) to mechane.journal@gmail.com by 5 May 2026. Authors of accepted proposals will be required to submit the complete text (max. 40,000 characters) by 15 September 2026. All contributions will be subject to double-blind peer review.