Equality - a word nourished by human dreams: Rancière’s criticism on contemporary pedagogical discourses

Abstract

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu attributes to education - and, in particular, to school form - the task of spreading and cultivating the love for equality, conceived as the political virtue par excellence and as the principle that supports the republican regime as a way of life. The challenge that his work poses to educators - that of an education system committed to making equality viable - mobilizes republican educational discourses which, since then, have tried to devise ways to implement the principle of equality within educational institutions. This article analyzes different ways by which educational discourses have proposed to operationalize this principle in terms of educational relationships. We start from the analysis of the public school as an effort to implement the liberal principle of equal opportunities, followed by the criticisms addressed to it by the reproductive theories and by the historical-critical pedagogical movement. In a third moment, we seek to articulate Rancière’s criticisms to both currents, as he presents a perspective in which the commitment to equality is not conceived as an objective of the educational action to be reached in the future, but as an axiom capable of producing egalitarian effects in present actions.