This article aims to present an analogy between the Jonathan Swift's satiric approach on The Gulliver's Travels on the flying island of Laputa in relation with the academic practices and the complexity theory postulated by Edgard Morin (2008). It intends to evidence how the events happened in the story are concerned with the holistic and integral vision of the pedagogical making. It starts portraying the systems and complexity theory and draws a glimpse of the historic trajectory of paradigms and their influence in the ways of thinking on a period. From there on, it discusses about how a paradigm can establish ways of thinking in individuals. After that, the dominant, residual and emergent aspects in the context of behavior and action of individuals are discussed. On these steps, it introduces the author Jonathan Swift and his book as an anticipation of the Morin's points of view on the complexity theory. To finish it analyses the parallels between the problem of the university portrayed by Swift (2004) and by Morin (2008) about the inconsistency of the knowledge compartmentalization and the need of an approach according to an interdisciplinary, complex and emergent paradigm in order to make possible the knowledge humanization and modernization. With the theory of complexity, it is increasingly discovered that there are no vain or real boundaries between epistemologies. Theorizing without practice results in a world of disinterested and alienated because knowledge becomes an end in itself. In the work of Jonathan Swift discussed here, there are, in fact, criticisms that show similar problems to those experienced today by the university, which suggests little or almost no evolution since then. There are clear similarities in the points of view between Swift (2004) and Morin (2008), of course, but not in how to approach the subject.
