Opening, Michel Fabre (University of Nantes)
Notion : Identity, Anne-Marie Drouin-Hans (University of Bourgogne)
Identity shows similarities and differences; it creates classifications and exclusions. Having acknowledged this, a certain number of questions arise. What is the nature of an individual’s ‘real’ identity? To what extent does this identity remain the same throughout time? How can we acknowledge the salience of ‘cultural identity’ and accommodate the ‘right to be different’ while taking into account their interrelationship? Why do identity and equality have a paradoxical relationship? To what extent is the experience of otherness fundamental to identity? How can we make sense of the notion of identity and make it ‘acceptable’?
Moral chronicle : Teaching, education and democracy, Jean-Bernard Mauduit
This article examines the question of the rights of the child, taking for granted in the first place that it makes sense to conceive of rights without reference to the opportunity to enjoy these rights. However, one wishes to define their status vis à vis that of adults, children cannot give either intellectual or practical expression to the rights they are ascribed. In examining the argument of Alain Renaud, the author shows that this is based on logical mistakes: equality of rights at birth does not entail from birth, likewise wishing to establish democracy in schools without mastery of the knowledge necessary to its exercise. The notion that learning to exercise freedom demands the abolition of authority in schools is based on a misinterpretation of Freud.
Report: Education and Otherness
Presentation, Alain Vergnioux (University of Caen)
What kind of educational policy can oppose ethnic categorization?, Françoise Lorcerie (Cnrs)
The first part of the article provides a concise and exact overview of discussions in political philosophy over the last thirty years from Rawls and Habermas to Taylor and J. Berque on the questions of otherness, integration and exclusion in democratic societies, together with the educational implications of these accounts. The second part analyses policy initiatives: the common space for cultures may be conceived as a social platform of the same status as the civic space; diverging expression may be widely tolerated; assimilation may seem to be the solution. This gives rise to paradoxical situations where the policy of ‘intercultural dialogue’ seems to reinforce the ‘essentialism’ of cultures. The third part makes use of Nancy Fraser’s descriptions of the two forms of injustice suffered by ethnic groups in order to outline possible ways of acceptance/integration of ethnic otherness in the educational arena.
Alternating, changing and conjoining: games of otherness and identity, Alain Vulbeau (University Paris X)
From a socio-ethnographical and socio-anthropological perspective, Alain Vulbeau addresses phenomena of cultural differentiation in terms of particular appropriations of urban spaces. His observations of groups of young people show that their ways of appropriation of this space (feeling ‘at home’ in a space which one does not own) rely on practices, patterns of movement and symbols which are specific to them or are often invented. Avoiding a too rigid distinction between identity and otherness, he describes that interactions that come into play based on notions of alienation (of the subject in terms that are foreign to him/her), alternating (of establishing a new identity) and change (such as modification or distancing), in order to construct the notion of conjoining which refers both to the processes and their effects, exchanges and original syntheses which are constantly changing.
Teaching through otherness, Jean-Marc Lamarre (IUFM Pays-de-la-loire)
This article proposes to develop and discuss the claim of Emmanuel Levinas that teaching is only possible in the space between the teacher, the content and the taught. Far from the notion that teaching can be a matter of sharing or of maieutic, Levinas asserts the total dissymmetry of the relationship and the transcendence and complete otherness of the teacher. The discussion brings to light the extreme fragility, in the face to face encounter that is speech, of magisterial status, because teaching is essentially teaching by another. There is a further point; the presence of the other in the same individual, which makes of her/him a ‘persecutor’. But in a second reversal, Levinas sees here the basis of subjectivity and responsibility. Examination of the objections made by M. Blanchot and J. Derrida do not succeed in undermining Levinas’s position. In fact there cannot really be ‘learning’ unless the learner has not had previous experience of radical ‘incomprehension’.
Education: the site of the outsider, Graciela Frigerio (University of Buenos Aires)
School is made up of spaces which are unfamiliar to one another and barriers between languages, disciplines and adults and children. It is necessary to navigate within one’s psyche according to different selves: the child in the adult, the child vis à vis the child, the adult vis à vis the child, etc. On entering a classroom one runs the risk of encountering misunderstanding and hostility, but also the possibility of receiving a warm welcome. One may experiences loss and absence, but also exploration and the on-going redefinition of the self.
Current forms and symptoms of childhood, Laurence Gavarini (University Paris VIII)
The otherness of the child in respect of the adult world is problematized within four theoretical contexts: scientific observation of the child, developmental psychology, the psychoanalytic approach, the re-definition of the stages of life. According to the author, the current phase is characterized by the ‘passion’ of childhood, but not without contradiction: strength and fragility, sacred and sacrificed – a feeling that has been heightened by child sex abuse. Having become the object of a dramatization referring to speech and body, childhood will be constantly reconceptualized by means of myths aiming to recapture its impossible truth.
Studies : Foucault and the problem of moral education, Laurent Jaffro (University Blaise Pascal – Clermont II)
From the perspective of Foucault’s work, the problem of moral education can be expressed with the following framework: self-control and subjectivation. But as the contradictions revealed by self-discipline show, the subject of education is also vulnerable to the techniques of power, there cannot really be true subjectivation because it is always ‘others who take care of me’. The author then develops two concepts of autonomy. In the ‘classical’ (republican) concept, freedom is always given and in fact it matters little that the rules are imposed, assumed or constructed. Conversely, education can be considered as a life skill that leads by stages to responsibility. According to Foucault, the effects of power appear in both cases; but a solution can be envisaged based on a stoic concept of self-control and of decision-making without it ever being possible to define criteria of autonomy.
Correspondence : Thinking of the other unconditionally (from inheritance, hospitality and education), Carlos Skliar (Flasco, Buenos-Aires)
Does the philosophy of Jacques Derrida help us to consider the questions of education and school, of the construction of otherness in a school context and these imaginary identities and communities? This question gives rise to another: what is Derrida’s own background that allows him to think in terms of otherness? The author puts forward four main concepts: difference, memory, genesis, writing and analyses at length the idea of deconstruction. It appears that the question of education is i) that of the transmission of inheritance, of its deconstruction, i.e. of its reconstruction; ii) the impossibility of translation; iii) that of hospitality, welcome and attentiveness and concern for the other. Finally he raises the question of the University, which in a democratic state ought to be a ‘University without conditions’.