This article is a provocation. It focuses on the learning society, its substance and rhetoric. Protagonists of the learning society advance the idea that schooling is dying, and that education should undergo re-engineering. A new infrastructure is proposed around the concept of on-line learning. This vision of the learning society suffers, however, from at least three defects. First, it assumes that what can be imagined can be delivered; secondly, that making something work is as simple as designing an infrastructure; and finally, that the learning society can escape from the power relations that also marked its predecessors.
Learning society; On-line learning; Millennium; Power; Empowerment
