It's nobody, it's the teacher! About the figure of the teacher and his craft

Abstract

This article aims to examine how efforts that seek to replace the personality of the teaching action by the impersonal technicality of its activity affect the teacher and the teaching profession. The discourse of technicization of education, a discourse structured around an intended completeness, centrality and autonomy of the technical and methodological dimension of education, conceives education as an activity that does not require the presence of someone, the presence of a subject to whom it is possible to enjoy a place of action and enunciation. What does the teacher do in the face of efforts to reduce teaching to an activity guided by the logic of factory production, marked by the automated repetition of processes that are independent of the uniqueness and personality of the one who performs it? Would this condition be related to the complaints, illnesses, feelings of devaluation and impotence frequently mentioned by teachers? The examination of these questions will be done in the light of a phenomenology of human activities, as conceived by Hannah Arendt, and of writings that seek to understand education from the contributions of psychoanalysis.