The author hypothesises a 'teacher being' who comes to be seen, in the light of collective behaviour, often of an unyielding sort, as an unwitting creator of 'mythologies', precepts, frameworks for interpreting reality. This 'teacher being' denies, in particular, that desire can play any part in the life of a school class. Pascal Bouchard questions this belief, showing that adolescents need both to experience this desire (which mediates their relationship to learning) and also to be protected from it.

What will tomorrow's children be like? To answer this question, one has first to identify the economic, social and biological changes which are reshaping the family: not only new kinds of work and virtual telecommunication, but also new shapers of our existence as physical beings - as childbearing is technically controlled and the deteriorations of old age are pushed back later and later. New social structures concerned with children's upbringing provide them with new mentors, with new affective guidelines. 'Fatherhood' and 'motherhood' are appearing in multiple new guises. Will children be happier, better loved ? The author refrains from making any predictions.

After a detour through the institutionalised homosexualitv of ancient Greek education, the author analyses the subtle interconnections found in the teaching relationship between knowledge and perversion. There are two paths aheal for the child - the first emancipatory, based on sublimation and an acceptance of castration, the second regressive and described by the author in terms of 'epistomania'. But the deficiency is also on the part of the teacher, divided between the picture of the child as on the one hand ignorant and needing to be filled with knowledge and on the other as a potential omnipotent genius confronted with whom his professional activity can make little headway. If the two images of teacher and pupil match each other, the fetish passes from the one to the other in a shared and perverse pleasure. If they do not, violence, rebellion and humiliation are the result.

Despite the ban on corporal punishment in force since the founding of the napoleonic university, nineteenth century literature pays abundant witness to the violence shown by schools towards their pupils. But, on the evidence of medical texts and legal archives, families did not lag behind in this. The end of the century saw the first prosecutions for paedophilia, an issue previously swept under the carpet, but these generally took a lenient attitude to the adults involved. That children were physically abused is undeniable : their bodies constitute, as it were, a record of moral evolution.

Judging by the rights it grants them, the International Convention of Children's Rights considers children as on all fours with adults, that is, as full citizens. Isn't there a paradox in this ? Should we see in this attitude a desire to redress an all too entrenched negative picture of childhood - a picture that our intellectual traditions trace back to St Augustine ? J-M Lamarre devotes this essay to re-examining this augustinian view of the child. He shows that Augustine's reflections on childhood, far from burdening it with the weight of original sin, see it as a metaphor for the irremediable weakness of human being : the child is so thoroughly human ! If children are to be loved, this should be, in Hans Jonas's words, love of a responsible kind, not redemptive or condescending.