Verifying equality, questioning the school. Notes about Jacques Rancière and Fernand Deligny

Abstract

Attacks on the school are becoming more and more frequent. These attacks come from different fronts, such as the theories of reproduction, which accuse it of alienating subjects, reproducing the conditions of inequality and injustice in society, and serving as a legitimizing apparatus of oppressive states. On the other hand, the most progressive theorists propose reforms that place it into line with social and market demands in order to make it useful, efficient and effective. The school is held responsible for functions that do not belong to it or for solving problems that it did not create and of which it is a victim. Criticism of the school tends to point to structural flaws that inevitably doom it to failure. At this point, the article proposes a shift in the way schools are usually approached, in order to trace what makes a school a school, instead of disqualifying or condemning it under the weight of prejudices and accusations that have become commonplace. The approaches of Rancière and Deligny will be fundamental in this journey. Thus, first, Rancière's elaborations on democracy and the verification of equality will be taken up in order to consider the school as scholè. With these basic formulations, the second moment pauses briefly on some gestures of the school to give way, in a third moment, to the challenges posed by Deligny, specifically from his work with autistic children, to think about the limits of education. To question education, school and childhood from the radicality of difference is the challenge that Deligny forces us to take up, and it is the philosophical-pedagogical gesture that accompanies these notes.