Can a myth be a useful tool for socio-pedagogical analysis and reflection? Apparently so: Philippe Meirieu uses the myth of the human creation of the monster as a pedagogical critique and as a tool for relaunching a new approach to educational studies. His text, Frankenstein Educator , in particular, has proven very useful and interesting for reflecting on and connecting elements not only in pedagogy but also in the sociology of education... and the imagination. Let's see how.
Who is Philippe Meirieu?
Philippe Meirieu is a French educationalist born on November 23, 1949, in Alès, in the Gard department of France. He was a university professor at the Lumière University Lyon 2 and has also held numerous positions of responsibility in teacher training and national education policy in France. Meirieu is known for his theoretical works in the field of pedagogy and his contributions to educational practice, particularly his promotion of a pedagogy of autonomy , which seeks to develop student autonomy through cooperative learning, participatory democracy, and teachers' care for their students.
Meirieu promotes the idea that learning is always a cooperative process , where teachers and students work together to achieve common goals. In a certain sense, Philippe Meirieu favors pedagogy as an "art of doing ." He also argues that learning must include a constantly nurtured participatory democracy, where students actively participate in the construction of knowledge and the development of their own skills.
Philippe Meirieu and the Frankenstein educator
Why Frankenstein? one might ask. The first thought goes to the creation myth, rendered unspeakable by this modern myth: one can construct a body, but not a person . Here lies the horrible and the undesirable, a very interesting characteristic from a sociological perspective: when we imagine Frankenstein, we set in motion an emotional mechanism of existential reworking of certain problematic issues such as death, the conflict between religious and scientific paradigms, the father/son relationship, and the moral tension between the state of nature and the social state of human beings (Bory, 2018). In other words, it is a tension or a questioning of our imagination.
In particular, in his text Frankenstein the Educator , Philippe Meirieu uses the myth of the created monster (therefore Frankenstein, but also the Golem and the like) as an identifying image of a critique of a very specific educational project: education as fabrication . For the author, the educator must avoid falling into the Manichean tendency of wanting to construct in the other (whether by educating or not) something or someone that reflects the will of their creator. But what does this expression mean?
The role of the educator
For Meirieu, the educator-student (but especially father-child) relationship is realized through the difficult reconciliation of the former's desire to transmit knowledge and values with the latter's freedom to choose and re-elaborate them. In other words, the educational relationship has a conflictual nature that must be accepted. With this acceptance, however, we must not remain inactive; rather, we must recognize our role as educators as a tool for fostering awareness and autonomy in others.
Education, therefore, must focus on reality, on the individual's relationship with the human world that embraces him. It serves to develop not only a formal intelligence, but above all a historical intelligence capable of recognizing our cultural roots. Beyond this, we must create opportunities, occasions, and provide the right tools so that the child, whether son or daughter, can build himself as a person.
"subject in the world, heir to a history whose stakes he perceives and a person capable of understanding the present and inventing the future" (Meirieu, 2007, p.14).
Between pedagogy and sociology: applications to other topics
What has just been expressed stands in stark contrast to the aforementioned Frankenstein project. This implies a constructed man whose knowledge of the world is merely the sum of his acquired knowledge and nothing more. However, it is not an easy project to combat: the tendency of men to exercise power over others is strong, but not only that. The tendency to want to create a kind of freedom for others to adhere to their own power is equally strong. Let us clarify this point.
In other situations – which are not necessarily educational – those who exercise any type of power want to be able to create a feeling of freedom in the student/subject or whoever acts on his behalf that does not correspond to a real but “controlled” freedom, exactly as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile.
To avoid this, a particular type of relationship must be created. Not only must it include respect for the other as a person but, in Pestalozzian terms, it must be a relationship in which the other has full freedom of choice and to become "his own work" (1974).
References
- Bory S., Frankenstein. The monster, the myth, the threshold, EXagere, 2018;
- Meirieu P., Frankenstein the educator, junior editions, Parma, 2007;
- Pestalozzi JH, People, work, education, The New Italy, Florence, 1974;
Lecturer in Communications and HR Management. Journalist with a degree in Sociology (cum laude). Editor-in-Chief of Sociologicamente.it.
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