Opening
Moral Chronicle: Questions to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ anti-humanism, François JACQUET-FRANCILLON
Claude Lévi-Strauss has repeatedly criticized the humanist ethics of the Renaissance, which he accuses of being at the origin of the Nazi camps. This strange theory is based on the idea that humanism has given a fallacious definition of man, which would have led to the separation of man from nature, and consequently to the separation of certain men from other men. Here we try to analyse the presuppositions of this thesis and to indicate possible paths for contesting it.
Notion: Socialization, Éric DUBREUCQ
The notion of socialization, formulated as a definition of education by Durkheim, appeared around 1900. It was the object of a critical resumption in the 1920-1930s, with figures such as Piaget and Cousinet, as well as other conceptions of “progressive education”, which inherited this idea and altered it. Sketching this history and genealogy allows to discern, at the center of this problematization, the question of educational power, of the teachers’ power to establish but also to limit, and the power of the child, which is to be cultivated, but also to be guided.
Report: Jewish Enlightenment and education
Presentation, Sophie NORDMANN
‘Medieval Jewish Enlightenment’: a Textual (Self)Education, David LEMLER
According to Leo Strauss, what distinguishes the “Medieval Enlightenment” from the Modern Enlightenment is intellectual elitism. Through an esoteric art of writing, it reserves knowledge to a select category of readers. It appears, however, that despite its elitist anthropology, Medieval Jewish Enlightenment contributed to the diffusion of philosophical knowledge among non-philosophers. As a result, it produced a specific theory of education according to which the effort to reach knowledge through texts induces a subjective appropriation of the truth. Such a theory gives full meaning to the centrality of studying in Jewish life, a life dedicated to self-education and the education of others through the confrontation with texts.
Alliance israélite universelle: a child of the Enlightenment in the Middle East?, Valérie ASSAN
Founded in Paris in 1860, the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) was the first transnational organization aiming to aid oppressed Jews. While its central goals were to fight discriminations against Jewish minorities and to improve their social integration, its prime form of action was education. Its large school network, which extended from Morocco to Iran, reached its peak in the wake of the First World War. This article, based on recent historiography, deals with the influence of the Haskala and the spirit of Enlightenment on AIU’s ideology and action, and on the ambiguous effects of its program of “regeneration” of Oriental Jews.
The ‘Jewish House of Free Study’ (freies jüdisches Lehrhaus) of Franz Rosenzweig, Gilles HANUS
The “Jewish House of Free Study”, which opened its doors in Frankfurt on October 17 1920 under the direction of Franz Rosenzweig. Thanks to the quality of its participants and of its pedagogical practices, it was one of the most interesting teaching experiences in the modern history of German Judaism. As a result of Rosenzweig’s long reflection on how to stimulate an intense Jewish life in the face of assimilative dilution, religious liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, and the Zionist dream, it was meant to renew the study of Judaism, heart of the Jewish life and world. Our article will attempt to synthesize its history and practices, and to draw avenues for reflection on education in general.
From the Haskala to the ‘Ecole juive de Paris’: Jewish Enlightenment and Emancipation, Sophie NORDMANN
The entry of Jews into Modernity is marked by the birth of the Haskala and by a process of political and social emancipation that continued throughout the nineteenth century. This article describes how French and German Jewish thinkers perceived this process over the past two centuries. We will focus on a particular educational action, the “École d’Orsay”, which opened its doors in 1946 and closed them in 1969.
Beyond meaning: Perec, the Talmud and the writing workshops, Suzanne AURBACH
When the writing approaches proposed by Georges Perec, who was Oulipian and much more, are implemented in writing workshops, we can see how these operations, which fracture meaning and open writing, correspond to the practices of the Talmud and the Kabbalah.
Education as a Universal Dimension of ‘Jewish Particularism’, Jean-Michel SALANSKIS
The paper is, throughout the text, a meditation on the possible analogy between the domain of education and research as a whole, and the Jewish domain. It builds on the fact that the Jewish and academic calendars coincide very closely (at least in France). It discusses the meaning of such analogy from the perspective of traditional Judaism; it reflects on the relation between sacred history and an internalist history of sciences; finally, it focuses on the connection between philosophy and traditional Jewish science.
Studies: Anthropophagy and its importance for an emancipatory education, Filipe CEPPAS
This article presents the ideas of Oswald de Andrade on anthropophagy and its importance for an emancipatory education. After a short presentation of the author and his Cannibal Manifesto, it presents anthropophagy as a critique of patriarchy and capitalism from a feminist perspective. The text establishes the connections between anthropophagy and the works of Pierre Clastres (Society against the State) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (The Savage Mind). It then considers its consequences on educational from an emancipatory perspective.
Studies: Riccardo Massa, an italian philosopher and pedagogue. Pedagocical thoughts of a former student, Joie ORSENIGO
Riccardo Massa (1945-2000) has been one of the leading pedagogical figures in Italy. As a left party exponent, he occupied an uncomfortable position, claiming the necessity of a secular and unprejudiced conception of education. He took inspiration from Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and most of all Michel Foucault to answer questions related to epistemology, pedagogy and the power of pedagogical Eros. He studied pedagogical lentencies with an innovative research, training and advising method called “Clinica della formazione”, which he himself invented. He worked to turn education into a profession by founding one of the first teacher training Faculties, namely the “Dipartimento di Epistemologia ed Ermeneutica della formazione”, at the Milano-Bicocca University in the early nineties. In this article, as a former student, I share his inheritance by commenting his work: the notion of pedagogical domain as a wide and complex set, where pedagogy loses its synthetic role but gains the dignity of other human sciences; as well as the recognition of the role of the educator within multidisciplinary teams.