Criticism of School Made Public (ePub)

The people who have already built up knowledge by drawing on their immediate environments are only confronted, in education, with the calls for professional integration, at the crossroads between learning knowledge or learning to communicate; whereas the people who have not built up knowledge go from consuming refined products in economics to consuming the most remote conclusions in science and teaching. The school, which is too public and too liberal, the one that has broken with the austerity of the old school in the vicinity of the temples, offers them no resistance.

People did not invent knowledge. Knowledge was already there, in nature. They only knew how to listen to nature. In asceticism, deprivation, "the outer and inner desert", they built knowledge; in turn, knowledge nourished and nourishes men. To exist, then, is to be in this debt; while to study is an inner joy of generosity, so that the chain of knowledge never breaks, especially not with me. However, the debate on education and knowledge will never be complete as long as the question of the contexts of the production of the same rational knowledge is not raised.

If we isolate what is common to all people, then we obtain the most determining contexts of the birth of refined knowledge and these contexts are to be reproduced, especially for those Nations that teach but do not produce the knowledge in which they should be rooted.

There remains the question of common humanity, between the new generations who, overcoming the frustrations of belonging to strong or weak humanities, must be liberated and assisted in the construction of their common history and their common humanity. The school must then once again be the place of hospitality, of generosity without borders and of the birth of humanity in perpetual maturation.