We all know that the programs and objectives of Primary and Secondary Education are usually politically oriented, both in general – for example, when mathematics is given an increase in the number of hours, as if the number of language hours were reduced; or forcing students to choose English as an alternative first language – as in the detailed subjects – as if the previous history were kept silent all the past, the twentieth century, in view of the larger version. Similarly, it is clear that politics is driving, directly or indirectly, the capitalist systems upon which the world depends. This is clear, for example, if we analyze the days of “discovery of the world of work” aimed at adolescents aged 13 to 15 years, because they link the world of work to the model of profitable enterprise. However, instead of being politically correct, I believe that up to now the administration of the Department of Education had not clearly assumed these contaminations.

However, the coming out of educational technocrats has taken place in a training that I have recently followed as a professor. Indeed, to the multitude of professors gathered at that session, the inspector who spoke of the official word of National Education made us perform an amazing activity. He showed us in a video the talk of a pedagogue at the University of Toulouse. In this sense, it was based on a mathematics problem for 9-year-old children, that is: If you buy two balls for EUR 2, knowing that one costs EUR 0.5 more than the other, how much does each cost? Most people, without thinking too much, answer that the ball costs EUR 1.5 and the second EUR 0.5, but the answer is correct, 1.25 and 0.75. That great pedagogue did not come to the conclusion that in mathematics we always have to check the results: “With this exercise your children have shown that man let intuition be imposed on reason, they are wrong on their way. As a teacher, your job should therefore be to silence the children’s intuitions in the classes and develop their reason.”

That is, through that man, National Education asked the students to twist these robots, censoring in themselves the brutal “intuitions” that they could present naturally. The investigator, as if it were necessary for his demonstration a protective authority, thought with horror: “I have not invented this conclusion: I owe it to a prestigious Nobel laureate in economics, Mr Finn Erling Kydland.” For this ultra-liberal economist, the human being is the main obstacle to the harmonious functioning of the economy, since, unlike the automata, it can have unexpected action to deal with events.

Therefore, the “formations” that French National Education can propose through official audits and pedagogues for teachers of children and young people aged between 3 and 15 years: unlike what was before, we have now been asked, without hairs in the mouth, that the sensitivity, intuition or imaginative capacity of the children we have in class move the ultraliberal economy better. The teachers had met us at that session, which we found shameful and violent. More than ever, we adults must offer today’s children and young people moments and tools to express their emotions and develop their creative capacity, especially those socially responsible for transmission.