The public school was born as an institution responsible for the common formation of citizens, for inserting them in the same culture, thus forming a nation. However, the victory of liberalism ended up, very early, transforming this task into an instructional practice, relegating the body, the arts, the human sensitivity to an accessory place in the school path. However, nowadays, the institution's monopoly over public education is threatened by the revolution in information and communication technologies, responsible for an overwhelming cultural transformation. With all these challenges, how could we think about school today? Would it be possible, given the individualism and immediacy of our current society, to think of its task as the practice of human formation? To answer those questions, we aim to analyze the historical moment that made possible the birth os cognitivism, its impacts in the idea of public school and how it, along with the liberal project, ignored the body in the process of human formation, reducing it to the simple task of instruction. Morover, the work aims to make a critical exam of the employment of digital medias in education, since it represents not only new possibilities for the school to revive the human formation ideal, but also new challenges to the public school project.