What School Teaches Us — and What It Makes Us Forget
- Gaëlle Miani
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
Questioning the Systems That Shape Us: Listening to Durkheim with Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
In the November 7, 2025 episode of Le Souffle de la pensée (France Culture), sociologist and philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie revisits the work of Émile Durkheim with striking relevance. What stands out in this conversation is not only the lucidity of Durkheim’s thinking, but its deep contemporary resonance. We like to imagine that society evolves rapidly, but the structures that shape us often persist far longer than we think.
Lagasnerie’s invitation is not to admire Durkheim from afar, but to use his thought as a critical tool—and this is where the episode becomes especially powerful.
What School Reveals… and What It Conceals
Durkheim reminds us that institutions—especially school—are never neutral. They are shaped by society, and they work to reproduce it. Lagasnerie goes a step further by evoking a kind of epistemology of ignorance: the idea that institutions transmit knowledge but simultaneously produce ignorance, intentionally or not.
It’s an unsettling idea, but an essential one:Every school system organizes not only what we are encouraged to know, but also what we are not encouraged to see.
This means there are blind spots woven into the very fabric of education:
life experiences that remain unrecognized,
forms of knowledge that are marginalized,
types of intelligence that are undervalued,
questions that learners are subtly discouraged from asking.
School does not merely teach. It channels, selects, legitimizes.And in doing so, it reveals what society values—and what it prefers to leave in the shadows.
Learning as a Space of Awareness
For learners, this perspective is freeing.Your struggles, your questions, your discomforts with school are not simply personal issues. They are shaped by social structures and invisible norms.
For educators, this opens a vital path of reflection:What do we really transmit when we teach?How might we be unconsciously reproducing the limits of the system itself?And what could we choose to do differently?
Through Lagasnerie’s reading, Durkheim reminds us that to think about school is already to begin transforming society.
An Invitation to Slow Down, Reflect, and Reimagine
This interview is not a theoretical lecture. It is a gentle but persistent call to look differently at what seems obvious.To recognize that school is not just a learning environment—it is a social and political space.It tells us much about who we want to be… and what we are willing to leave unquestioned.
Taking an hour to listen to this conversation is an opportunity to see the educational system as a mirror of our collective choices.And perhaps, to start imagining new possibilities.
To go further (in French)
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