Why a Relationship between Education and Biology?

Abstract

In the Eighties, learning was assumed as a synergic junction to which could be traced the contributions of all those disciplines whose competence perpetually is intertwined with the more specifically pedagogical one. The most important and perhaps the least considered relationship seemed to be the biological one. The issue concerning the timing and modalities of the epigenetic modulation of synaptic connectivity, regulated by the incidence of critical periods in ontogenetic development, can be considered one of the thematic nuclei of research on the functioning of the brain; in fact, the processes of synaptic connectivity vary in relation to the incidence of critical periods in brain development, periods during which the organism manifests a significant opening to environmental stresses. In the course of phylogeny, the environment and the genetic potentials of man are the constituent elements that enable them to carry out cognitive processes that make the management of the environment possible. It is a feedback system in which the biological form - albeit related to the genetic program - is defined in relation to environmental and physical interactions. Paradoxically, it is the same biological key that guarantees the cultural element as constitutive of the form, and of the subject that is formed: through the analysis of the biological mechanism it is possible to recognize and, in a certain sense, "defend" the incidence of cultural element in the development of the human species.