Postmodernity seems to summarize the very difuse senses of the fragmentation of a modern mode of understanding legitimacy. The current shifts add up not merely to a transformation, but to an essential break from modernist world and concepts. The change can be seen as an exhaustion of Enlightenment concepts of progress and rationality, or as the advent of a new economic era of disorganization and flexibility in the economic realm, or as the abandonment of classic methodologies in the production and management of knowledge. This article shows that an integrative perspective of such an importance is necessary for a comprehensive examination of the changes now affecting education.