The big acceleration in digital education in Italy: The COVID-19 pandemic and the blended-school form

This article deals with the COVID-19 pandemic as a point of acceleration for the emergence of a distinctive and yet unstable problematization of the 20th-century school form. Focusing on the Italian public and policy debate on education and adopting an archaeological analytics, it explores what ‘other’ coordinates for the forms of schooling are emerging through the encounters, clashes and co-options between different epistemological standpoints. Mapping the knowledge production about the space(s), time(s) and subjectivity(/ies) of schooling, we discuss the emergence of a problematization of the school form articulated around the concept of ‘blending’ and unfolding around a distinctive set of organizing dualisms: developmentalizing/securing, normalization/pluralization and individual/population. We offer a preliminary sketch of the contours and tensions that constitute the epistemic space where this problematization unfolded. First, we show how medical, economic, digital and educational knowledges converge around the imperative to blend the school form and make it secure and productive through the ‘digital’. Second, we describe the paradoxical traits of the emerging figure of the blended-school form at the intersection between different possible configurations of the space(s) and time(s) of schooling and isolate four strategies for the (self-)governing of its subjectivities: therapy, prudentialism, discipline and enhancement.