The school without a world

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Bianca Thoilliez

In recent years, a concern has taken root in educational debate that can no longer be dismissed as nostalgia or resistance to change: the sense that knowledge itself is at risk. Not because it has disappeared, but because its place in the school has become unstable, secondary, almost indistinct. Among secondary teachers in particular, this perception recurs with striking regularity: ‘there’s no time to teach’, ‘everything is swallowed up by competences’, ‘bureaucracy is consuming us’. These are not technical complaints. They are symptoms. The deeper problem is more serious: the school is losing its relationship with the world. And when the school loses the world, it loses its reason for being. For decades, schooling rested on a relatively clear and widely shared idea: to give newcomers structured access to the cultural goods a society deems valuable. This was not merely a matter of socialisation, skills training, or preparation for a future labour market, but something both more elementary and more ambitious: placing the world within reach of the new generation. Texts, works, concepts, theories, maps, experiments, languages: fragments of the best the world has to offer, selected so that young people might orient themselves within a reality they did not choose, but in which they already find themselves.

This gesture implied a double responsibility. On the one hand, to assume the world as it is (imperfect, conflictual, marked by wounds); on the other, to trust in the freedom of those who arrive, in their capacity to renew it in ways we cannot — and should not — anticipate. Teaching was, in this sense, a fundamentally intergenerational act: to say, ‘this is our world; it is not perfect, but it is the one we have; I will show it to you and help you understand it; it is now your task to receive it, make sense of it, and perhaps transform it’. That gesture is weakening. Today, the curriculum is increasingly conceived as a device of anticipation: a way of preparing pupils for an uncertain, volatile, accelerated future. In the name of this preparation, content has gradually lost its centrality. What matters is no longer so much the works, texts, or concepts themselves, but the capacities supposedly needed to handle them — as though something unknown could be handled at all. The curricular question has shifted from ‘what is worth teaching?’ to ‘what should pupils be able to do?’ Content is subordinated to competence; valuable things to performance.

The result is a slow but persistent dematerialisation of the curriculum. Poems become tools for exploring emotions; maps become supports for activities; experiments become assessable procedures; history becomes a vehicle for civic competences; mathematics becomes a set of functional applications. The classroom fills up with tasks and, in the process, empties of the world. There is a great deal of apparent ‘activity’ (often in groups), but very little genuine study.

This shift has structural consequences. It alters the form of knowledge, which becomes lighter and more utilitarian; the role of the teacher, who loses authority as a representative of the world; the role of the pupil, who becomes a subject of action rather than of attention; and the very purpose of the school, which no longer brings the world into view and instead limits itself to the management of learning processes.

When content dissolves, the didactic triangle (teacher–content–pupil) collapses. There is no longer a shared point of reference capable of sustaining the educational relationship. It is hardly surprising, then, that many teachers have the daily, concrete sense that they are being asked to teach ‘about nothing’, nor that many pupils perceive — with a lucidity we often underestimate — that nothing truly important or lasting is being offered to them. School disengagement is not merely a motivational issue; it is, to a large extent, a problem of estrangement from the world.

In this context, we must recover the curriculum’s central question: what is worth teaching today? Not in terms of immediate usefulness or future profitability, but in terms of value.

Selecting content is not a technical or neutral operation. It is an ethical act of the highest order. It requires discerning which fragments of the world we consider sufficiently valuable to place before everyone, without exception. It requires acknowledging that not everything is of equal worth, and that not everything can be replaced without losing, along the way, things that matter. Not ‘content’ in the abstract, but the concrete things of the world that structure educational experience: works of art, books, mathematical concepts, scientific theories, organisms, artefacts, landscapes, narratives, philosophical texts. These ‘things’ are not accessories to teaching; they are the core that allows teacher and pupil to meet around something that transcends them both and, for that very reason, gives meaning to their encounter in the classroom.

The educational relationship does not rest on interpersonal interaction alone, nor on sympathy, nor on induced motivation. It rests on shared attention to something valuable — something worthy of the time and effort required to study, understand, and interpret it. The teacher transmits not only information, but a way of seeing, a way of caring for what is taught. When these ‘things’ disappear, the educational relationship becomes fragile, psychologised, exposed to the volatility of interests and to emotional exhaustion.

For this reason, it is crucial to reclaim the idea of teachers’ love for the things they teach. To love a thing is not to desire or use it, but to recognise its value and to safeguard it for others: to feel the urgency of sharing it. Teaching a poem, a theorem, or a scientific concept does not mean exhausting it or turning it into a mere resource, but keeping it alive through the didactic process, allowing it to continue speaking to those who have just arrived in the world — and who are, at that moment, sitting in the classroom. This love is not sentimentalism. It is, rather, a form of epistemological fidelity: an active trust that the world contains goods whose transmission remains worthwhile, even when their effects are neither immediate nor measurable. Such fidelity requires time and space. It requires libraries that are not merely repositories of resources, laboratories that are not reduced to simulations, classrooms that once again become spaces of public conversation. Above all, it requires repositioning the teacher not as a facilitator of activities, but as an interpreter of the world: someone who knows the genealogy of things, who understands why they matter and what possibilities they open up.

Recovering the world in the school also means recovering amor mundi in the Arendtian sense. This is not a naïve love, but a responsible one. To love the world is to recognise it as a legacy: something we did not choose, but which we must transmit if we do not wish to leave the young orphaned of reference points. It means presenting the world in its ambivalence, with its injustices and failures, but also with its admirable works, discoveries, and forms of beauty and meaning. To conceal it is to fall into a form of infidelity that is, ultimately, a form of falsehood: towards ourselves, towards those who have just arrived, and towards those we do not yet know.

The teacher’s authority does not rest on technique or charisma, but on generational representation. The teacher is the one who assumes responsibility for answering for the world before those who arrive. And this authority is expressed, above all, in the selection of content: deciding what to teach is deciding which world is worthy of being shared.

Recovering the world is not nostalgia. Nostalgia looks backwards; responsibility looks forwards. To recover the world in the school is a political act (because it defines the kind of world we wish to preserve in common), an ethical act (because it demands adult judgement and discernment), and a pedagogical act (because only through things does education recover its orienting and stabilising centre). If the school is to remain a school, it must once again place the world before pupils. Name it. Offer it. Sustain it. For only where there is a world, is there education. And only where there is education can the world continue to be a world for those who arrive — without what is valuable being lost to us, perhaps forever.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons