About irremediable education

Abstract

In the wake of the tradition of psychoanalytic studies in education, the author elucidates the current insistence of adults, sometimes professionals, sometimes simple parents, of administering medication to children when they are not actually sick. The reasoning is structured around the counterpoint between two educational experiences that took place in the 19th century, that of the so-called wild boy of Aveyron, in post-revolutionary France, and that of Helen Keller, a seven-year-old blind and deaf girl, in the post-revolutionary United States secession war. This counterpoint allows the author to clarify what is at stake in education; not an effective education, as we are used to dreaming nowadays, but a subjectivizing education, that is, one capable of making a subject of speech emerge.