Academic Despotism: the Incomplete Educational Revolution

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Oriol Corcoll Arias

In a small number of schools that could still, even today, be described as “good” by international standards—and this must be said without irony: schools that truly believe in what they are doing, that have built a serious pedagogy and train teachers to cultivate curiosity rather than merely administer content—the learner’s profile is made explicit. Curiosity comes first; courage in the face of uncertainty; learning how not to be intellectually governed.

This scene already sits uneasily alongside the experience of public schooling in Catalonia—the one everyone criticises. But the unease deepens when it is set against the dominant university experience: a system of gatekeepers that penalises precisely the dispositions schools identify as most valuable. This is not a violent rupture or a clean break. The mechanism is subtler, and therefore more effective. Sanction and disincentive are gradually administered until the adult learns to translate curiosity into prudence, risk into silence, and exploration into the safe imitation of the canon. The problem must be named. There are frontline teachers—true educational partisans—wasting time and strength, fighting with the tools of the Enlightenment while, in the rear, the university has already come to terms with despotism. Hence the need to defeat the academic Minotaur: the creature that, from the pestilent darkness of the institutional labyrinth, destroys the fresh innocence of the curious mind.

When rigour becomes despotism

The paradox is obvious. The university should be the natural space in which this salvific subject—driven by a genuine hunger to learn—receives the tools and the freedom to unfold fully, to recognise itself as light. Social change would then be assured. Yet academia all too often operates as a form of “enlightened despotism” adapted to knowledge: everything for reason, but without the learners. The classical formula captures the logic with cruel precision: Everything for the people, nothing by the people. Translated into campus terms: “we want excellence, innovation and critical thinking—but not free decisions about what counts as innovation; not interpretations that fall outside the grammar of rigour; not proposals that alter the framework”. In practice, the framework is whatever preserves positions, hierarchies and salaries. The question, then, is unavoidable. At what point—and for what reason—does a principled commitment to curiosity become a threat? The answer is uncomfortable but clear. Some are employed to teach towards the future; others to keep the past intact. And one task negates the other. Is there, after all, an irreconcilable divide between school and university?

Gatekeeping and the inversion of values

To speak of gatekeeping in academia is to point to very concrete mechanisms: peer review, committees, panels, assessment procedures, and cultures of implicit criteria. These mechanisms have been studied. Research on peer review shows that its effectiveness is often assumed rather than demonstrated through large-scale evidence, and it documents systematic errors of omission—innovations that are filtered out—as well as other structural dysfunctions.

Studies consistently show that review processes favour research that is securely embedded within the existing literature. In other words, “exploration” is encouraged—but only of terrain that has already been mapped. Novelty that does not speak the language of the canon is read as danger rather than as knowledge. This amounts to intellectual value extraction: schools produce critical and curious students; universities appropriate the prestige of having educated them, while neutralising them so they do not disturb the established order.

Here intuition crystallises into diagnosis. Everything fought for in classrooms, in the streets and in unions is quietly undone. Curiosity—a school virtue—becomes “dispersion” or “lack of focus” at university. Risk—a school virtue—becomes “imprudence” or “excessive ambition”. A change of framework—a core virtue of inquiry—is rebranded as “lack of rigour” or “disciplinary misalignment”. Dialectical openness is dismissed as “an incoherent narrative”.

The research also describes the “essential tension” between professional demands for productivity and the impulse towards risky innovation. High-risk strategies tend to be rarer and more frequently ignored, even though they can generate extraordinary impact. Small teams are more likely to produce genuinely disruptive research; large teams tend to consolidate and extend existing ideas. The institutional translation is straightforward: environments that reward safety, scale and predictability systematically disincentivise the kind of disruption inquiry promises.

School victories, university defeats

This is the most urgent and painful point. Activism, innovation and pedagogical commitment are plainly visible in the early stages of education—and have been for some time—but the circuit breaks at the moment of certification and reproduction. Who, with the slightest sense, would prune the shoot just as the seed begins to germinate? The Enlightenment is pursued in the classroom, while despotism remains intact at the centre of institutional power.

This is not merely unjust; it is historically inefficient. If the world demands—ever more asymptotically—greater capacity to interpret uncertainty, greater tolerance for complexity, greater transdisciplinarity, then it cannot afford an institution that concentrates the symbolic capital of knowledge while operating as a mechanism of domestication.

Revolution

First, however, something must be said plainly. While teachers at lower levels struggle and clash, academics observe with quiet satisfaction, enjoying the misdirection. The trick is perfect: all eyes are fixed on the revolutionary classroom, and no one notices the institution that later neutralises it.

What is required is something more radical: an institutional right to risk, and to ambition. Without the right to be wrong—with reasons—curiosity collapses into propaganda. Into posturing. Paulo Freire names this with precision: liberating education consists of “acts of cognition”, not transfers of information. But if genuine acts of cognition are to be taken seriously, institutions must assess trajectories rather than isolated products. They must reward iteration: how and why hypotheses change, how uncertainty is navigated, how the path is made explicit—not merely whether the conclusion satisfies a panel.

Not finished

Ultimately, anyone committed to high-quality primary education must simultaneously demand guarantees that what is won in the classroom will not be stripped away on campus. Without this institutional coherence, pedagogical activism evaporates. The struggle remains—and will remain—incomplete so long as what is taught (curiosity and risk) is systematically misaligned with what is rewarded (conformity and prudence). The only revolution worth pursuing is an integral one: from early curricula to the mechanisms of academic reproduction. A new image is needed for that revolution—not Liberty Leading the People with its tricolour flag, but Knowledge guiding the teacher: books open, disciplines functioning as bridges, and an institution that finally recognises its role as one of orientation rather than expulsion. Only then will genuine curiosity cease to be a hashtag slogan and become what it ought to be: a durable form of intellectual life, and a credible path to social change.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons