In France, debates concerning education are too often reduced to debates about school. Our history certainly invites that: no other country is built through and around its school system more than ours. And if we don't restore hope in an institution that today has been broadly reduced to a triage center, we will have to face both the explosion of youth and the depression of teachers. When fatalism triumphs and disappointment is the rule among those who incarnate the future, we have something to worry about.... In consequence, let's celebrate the way the electoral campaign has made a place for scholastic problems.

All the same, we are not absolved from deeper consideration of the issue. The symptoms are there which insist and stutter: worries about the drop in level, questions about authority, arguments over the reciprocal responsibilities of parents and teachers, and terror before acts of violence that defy all understanding. The scholastic question cannot be considered independently from the very organization of our society, and, more specifically, the status this society gives childhood.

We are faced with a completely unheard-of phenomenon: caprice - which used to be only a stage in the individual child's development - has become the organizing principle of our collective development. We, in fact, know that the child always goes through a phase in which he believes he can boss beings and things around. Whether one talks about initial narcissism or infantile egocentrism, one always emphasizes the same phenomenon: the child, enmeshed in desires that he cannot yet either name or register in an encounter with someone else, is tempted to move to action. The educator should therefore accompany the child; teach him not to react immediately with violence, not to rush headlong into a collision.... To take the time to question himself, anticipate, reflect, metabolize his impulses, construct his will. That's the business of pedagogy.

People do not leave infantilism behind on their own: people need to be included in social configurations that give meaning to waiting and allow people to glimpse, through the inevitable frustrations, the promise of future satisfactions. A business that is never "locked-up": infantilism dogs us in our maturity, and the temptation remains great at every stage of life to abolish otherness in order to reinstate oneself - if only for a moment - on the throne of the tyrant.

Today, the entire social machinery, far from supplying points of support to the child for freeing himself from infantilism, infinitely echoes and reflects exactly that principle education must teach him to free himself from: "Your impulses are your orders." Thus has the "purchase impulse" become the motor of our economic development. Advertising short-circuits all reflection and exalts moving to immediate action. Television zaps faster than television watchers: to glue them to the screen and prevent them from moving on to another channel. The cell phone reduces human relations to management of the immediate injunction. Everything murmurs into the ears of children and adolescents: "Now, right away, at any price ..."

So we shouldn't be surprised, under these conditions, that it's become more difficult to educate today: parents know the energy necessary to counter the stranglehold of fashions, brands, and stereotypes imposed by the "youth grapevine" and echoed by the media. Teachers daily observe the difficulty of constructing effective work space that allows concentration, the formation of self-control and investment in a task. They see their students come to class with a remote control grafted to their brain, a high-tech phallus that dynamites all the academic rituals they work so hard to implement. Teachers' main preoccupation - what exhausts them today - is to reduce tension in order to benefit attention. And that's where the malaise is located: less in the declining performance level than in the mounting tension.

Faced with this flood of infantilism, magical thinking makes its ravages: restoring authority, changing reading methods, and teaching basic arithmetic starting in preschool are presented as the means of saving letters in the Republic! A triumph of technocratic prescription when we need to doggedly create pedagogical situations in which the child discovers, in action, that immediate gratification is deadly and that desire is only possible within a temporal construction.

However, in the face of this modernity that produces the means to barbarism, totalitarian thinking also advances underhandedly. It feeds on fear and always deploys itself according to the same logic: tracking down, as early as possible, individual deviances; circumventing them by isolating and medicalizing all these "troubles;" categorizing, classifying and separating individuals, and subjecting them to a logic of service controlled by private interests. Triumph of a soft normalization, elected by the plebiscite of liberal individualism, when, on the contrary, what is necessary would be to unlock destinies by allowing the word to circulate, allowing subjects to stake themselves in unlikely projects and to encounter opportunities for personal involvement and for creating the collective.

Thus, because the scholastic crisis is profoundly related to fundamental issues, one cannot resolve it with narrowly defined technical measures. It's the crisis in education that must be treated by posing questions that remain very broadly obscured: may we continue to consider the child as a purchasing adviser, a captive public for advertising? Mustn't we, finally, take the question of the media - and, in particular, the audio-visual media - seriously, by asserting that their freedom of expression is being practiced in a democracy and must be accompanied by a duty to educate? Mustn't we rethink management of childhood by loosening up, at least a little, on evaluative pressure? Mustn't we relaunch popular education to offer a leisure and cultural alternative to consumer frenzy? Mustn't we, finally, make parental support a political priority, rather than considering parents in difficulty as offenders or mental cases?

Of course, schools will have to find their place in these overall arrangements: considering how best to counter the coagulations of students that occur today instead of "classes"..., by structuring demanding work groups in which each student has a place and is not tempted to take up all the space ..., by articulating a pedagogy of discovery which gives meaning to knowledge, and a pedagogy of rigorous elaboration that will allow students to appropriate that knowledge for themselves ..., by developing a veritable artistic, physical and sports education that helps each student develop from gesticulation to gest ..., by tracing school time as a "pedagogy of the masterpiece," so that everyone may subscribe to a project and stop demanding everything, right away, all the time.

All levels of schooling and every academic discipline can and must involve itself in this undertaking - as must all social actors, by imagining and implementing educational plans capable of countering globalized caprice everywhere, but also by daring to question whether education for democracy and the all-powerfulness of the market are compatible, and what alternatives we can invent to get out of this impasse....

Philippe Meirieu is a professor at the Universit� Lumi�re-Lyon II and an official for the educational television channel, Cap Canal.

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3232,36-886529,0.html

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_032707G.shtml