When we talk about school bullying, we think of pupils bullying each other. The violence that pupils suffer at the hands of adults, public grading, ranking, punishment, goes unexamined, and merely talking about it is taken as an attack on teachers. That is not my point. Nobody chose this situation, teachers are subjected to it too, and that is what I call systemic. I would simply like to offer here an unusual perspective, which I believe useful to those who do this work in the field. The subject has been studied for more than forty years, and it remains almost absent from public debate.
“It’s for your own good”
In 1980, the psychoanalyst Alice Miller published the founding book of this field, C’est pour ton bien. Racines de la violence dans l’éducation de l’enfant (For Your Own Good. Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence). In it, she describes what she names, taking up Katharina Rutschky’s expression, poisonous pedagogy (literally “black pedagogy”), that educational tradition which breaks the child’s will for their supposed good. Her most disturbing discovery concerns denial. Educational violence does not survive despite its justification, it survives through it. The child must believe they are being hit or humiliated for their own good, the adult believes it too, having been raised that way themselves, and the violence becomes invisible to both. This is the exact mechanism of the taboo I am describing: we do not see what we have learned to regard as a good.
Olivier Maurel extended this work in France with La Fessée. Questions sur la violence éducative (Spanking: Questions on Educational Violence), published in 2001 by La Plage, and then by founding the Observatoire de la violence éducative ordinaire (Observatory of Ordinary Educational Violence). In the concept of ordinary educational violence, everything lies in the word ordinary. This violence is not hidden, it is normal, exercised in public, approved of, recommended. The law of July 10, 2019 finally wrote into the French Civil Code that parental authority is exercised without physical or psychological violence. That law addresses families. At school, handing back papers in descending order of marks remains perfectly legal, and ranking is even one of the institution’s official instruments.
Yves Bonnardel offered an overall theory of this asymmetry in La domination adulte. L’oppression des mineurs (Adult Domination: The Oppression of Minors), in 2015. His thesis fits in one sentence: adult domination is the last relation of domination that our societies do not question, the one whose challenging still seems absurd or dangerous. One may debate its radicalism. It has the merit of naming the reason why what I write here will seem polemical to some readers, when I am only describing everyday, documented practices.
Papers handed back in descending order of marks
For the French school system, this documentation exists. In 2005, the sociologist Pierre Merle published L’élève humilié. L’école, un espace de non-droit ? (The Humiliated Pupil: School, a Lawless Space?), reissued in 2012. There is something troubling about his method. He asked young adults enrolled in IUFM, the teacher-training institutes of the time, and therefore future teachers, to recall a moment of their own schooling when they had felt humiliated and deprived of a right. The corpus he obtains is therefore not made up of extreme cases, it is made up of the ordinary memories of people who did rather well at school.
The vast majority of these people recount assessment situations. Papers handed back in descending order of marks, the worst ones read aloud, pupils seated in the classroom according to their results. Merle links these practices to what he calls the ideology of ranking, in whose name one feels entitled to publicly single out the pupil judged weak. He also shows that some middle and high school rulebooks do not comply with school law, and from there he raises a question that seems to me the right one: is the republican school a democratic organization, that is, an organization that guarantees the dignity of its members?
Merle is careful to point out that teachers also experience situations of humiliation in the classroom. He chooses to study the other side because it is less studied, pupils not writing books. I make the same choice, for the same reason, without taking anything away from the violence that adults endure in schools.
Cortisol and the hippocampus
The neuropsychologist Sonia Lupien has been studying the effects of stress hormones on the human brain for more than thirty years. Two results of her work bear directly on school. First, as she set out with Françoise Maheu in 2003 in the journal médecine/sciences, a disruptive situation impairs the learning of the information presented in it, whereas we remember an emotionally striking event very well. In other words, being stressed and learning do not combine well. Second, with Suzanne King, Michael Meaney and Bruce McEwen, she showed in 2001 that children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds have higher cortisol levels than others.
An institution that organizes permanent assessment under threat of sanction therefore places pupils in the state in which we retain the least, and it places there even more those who already arrive with a higher level of stress. Cognitive psychology allows us to go further, and to understand why this state degrades not only memory, but learning itself.
Thinking against one’s own thinking
The psychologist Olivier Houdé, who long directed the LaPsyDÉ laboratory at the CNRS, calls cognitive resistance the capacity to learn by resisting one’s own automatisms. He made a book of it with a programmatic title, Apprendre à résister (Learning to Resist), published by Le Pommier in 2014, and then an overall theory. Our brain has two regimes well described since Daniel Kahneman, a heuristic way of thinking, fast, automatic, economical, which applies what has already worked, and a reflective way of thinking, slow and costly, which builds the new. Houdé adds a third system, housed in the prefrontal cortex, whose function is to inhibit the reflex to give reflection its chance. Learning something new means, very concretely, creating new neural connections, and this operation is expensive, the brain accounting for about 2% of the body’s mass and consuming around 20% of its energy at rest. Houdé sums it up in a formula: learning requires “thinking against oneself”.
Yet this very inhibition does not withstand stress. The neuroscientist Amy Arnsten established, in a landmark article published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2009, that even moderate acute stress, as soon as one does not control the situation, rapidly deprives the prefrontal cortex of its means, and that at the same moment emotional responses and habits, carried by the amygdala and the striatum, grow stronger. People used to say reptilian brain; the image dates from the 1960s and scientists have abandoned it, but the phenomenon it designated is solidly documented. Under threat, we switch into reflex and protection mode. This is excellent news when we must flee a danger, and a catastrophe when we should be learning, since learning requires the opposite, suspending the reflex to build the new.
A pupil who is afraid of being graded, mocked, ranked, thus finds themselves neurologically unable to do what is being asked of them. And this fear is not only fear of the grade. Thinking for oneself means stepping outside the norm, and stepping outside the norm means risking one’s social place, which, in adolescence, when that place is under full construction, costs more than at any other age. Trust, respect, everyone’s place in the group are not a pedagogical nicety, they are the biological and social conditions of learning. I said a word about this in Educating about images, organising disagreement, and I wanted to establish it more fully here.
Twenty-one percent of the variation
We often hear that France ranks among the worst education systems in the world. That is not what the PISA surveys, conducted every three years by the OECD, actually say. In 2022, fifteen-year-old French pupils were in the average of OECD countries in mathematics, reading comprehension and science.
The surveys do show something else, consistently, and it is more serious. France remains one of the countries where the link between social origin and results is strongest. In 2022, the score gap in mathematics between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils reached 113 points there, against an OECD average of 93, and the index of socio-economic and cultural background explained 21% of the variation in performance, against 15% on average. The OECD notes that larger gaps are observed in only very few countries.
The French system is therefore not mediocre on average, it is inegalitarian. It sorts efficiently. That is what an apparatus of assessment and ranking does: it sorts, and it sorts all the better because what it actually measures is, to a large extent, what families have passed on before school. Lupien’s work cited above adds a physiological dimension to this observation: the least advantaged children arrive in class with more cortisol, that is, less available for the very cognitive effort that is about to be measured in them.
“We’re going to work on violence prevention”
For a long time, I was asked for film projects about violence prevention. Announcing to young people that you are going to work with them on violence prevention means, first of all, postulating their violence. They are not fooled, they have understood the institution’s expectations very well and they know how to meet them, showing the adults their credentials in this precise setting in order to obtain social legitimation from it. So they make well-behaved, right-thinking school films, since the expected answer is contained in the assignment. And it has nothing to do with their lives. Children put it very well, and professionals report it to me regularly: in class you say things, but outside, in real life, it’s nothing like that.
There is a complete confusion here between stating an objective and achieving it. Saying that violence is bad, everyone knows how to do that, and no one has ever shown how it prevented anything at all. If we really want to prevent violence, we work on empathy, and empathy is not taught head-on, it is lived. We make films together, we gather, we organize screenings, we listen to each other, and we put nothing at all in the assignment. People then discover through their own experience that a way of being attentive to others is richer for everyone, and that is what educates them, whatever the subject. I detailed this reasoning in Supporting Young People on What Is Theirs to Live and I recounted a project built on this basis in The boat of empathies.
Seven years of Spanish
The same confusion between the statement and the thing sits at the center of the teaching profession. To teach in middle school, high school or university, you must know a discipline, and it is taken for granted that this is enough to transmit it. I learned Spanish for seven years, in middle school and then in high school, with teachers who knew their discipline very well. I cannot speak Spanish, and I do not understand it. For seven years I was placed in the position of the one who does not know and to whom people who know better are going to explain, I was judged and humiliated there, and I still carry this instituted incompetence today. Those who fared better owed it to other causes, their background, their ease, a more comfortable submission to authority, or sometimes a real love of that language, which managed to be born even within that framework, and I do not mean to say that this does not exist.
Jacques Rancière gave this paradox its sharpest form in Le maître ignorant (The Ignorant Schoolmaster), in 1987: “whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies”. Explaining something to someone means first of all signifying to them that they could not understand it on their own, and this position, repeated year after year, manufactures the very incapacity it claims to remedy. The role of a teacher is not first to transmit content, it is to make sure that people learn, by themselves, and for that it is not even necessary to know what they are learning; that is the whole lesson of the book, whose founding experience I recounted in « So what do we offer them ? ». The bullying I am talking about is therefore systemic; it lodges in the very design of curricula founded on disciplinary knowledge to be explained, before any gesture of any particular adult.
School and prison
I then propose that we look at what pupils actually learn in an organization of this kind. We learn from what we live, learning is inscribed in us through emotions, and Lupien’s work on emotional memory confirms this in its own way. Young people who are ranked, subjected to orders and prohibitions, whose freedom and dignity are not always respected, learn first of all that, those particular modalities of social functioning. Bullying among pupils, which exists and which destroys, does not fall from the sky; it reproduces among peers a domination that the institution exercises and stages every day. The sociologist Éric Debarbieux, who introduced victimization surveys into French schools, reaches a neighboring conclusion by another route: you do not push bullying back through punishment, you push it back through the overall climate of the school, that is, through the quality of the relationships that the institution itself organizes.
Michel Foucault described the structural kinship fifty years ago. At the end of the chapter on panopticism in Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish), in 1975, he asks whether it is surprising that the prison resembles factories, schools, barracks and hospitals, “which all resemble prisons”. One may judge the formula excessive, and teachers bring to life every day, within this framework, something entirely different from surveillance. It does at least name what the architecture of timetables, rows, exit permissions and sanctions has in common with disciplinary institutions, and it reminds us that this organization has nothing natural about it.
Autonomy is not learned through restraint
Every new school year now brings its share of announcements of new restrictions, in the name of protecting children. Some measures can be defended one by one. The overall message that young people receive is something else: you are incapable of conducting yourselves, you must be restrained just to be fit to live. Behind these announcements lies a conception of the child as a little savage to be brought into line, and this conception is false. It does not exist, a child who does not want to learn. All children want to learn, and the real question is what the institution does with this desire.
You do not build a person’s autonomy by signifying their incapacity to them, for the reason I have developed throughout this article: what they will learn is what they live, constraint and distrust. If we want autonomous adults, we need places where young people exercise their autonomy, with adults who accompany them, and psychosocial skills worked on as content in their own right and not as a supplement. The institution itself is the first curriculum.
A film is not corrected
In a creative workshop, something shifts. There is no right answer to give. We invent characters, we stage scenes, we laugh at what goes wrong, we show others what we have made. The tension between right and wrong disappears, and with it part of the fear. In Houdé’s sense, a workshop is a place where inhibition becomes possible again, since no one is in danger there. What remains difficult is that we are always poor judges of ourselves, especially before what we have just invented, for which no criteria yet exist. Showing others, in a benevolent context, is precisely what makes it possible to get through that.
I am not saying there is no longer any standard of quality; there is a great deal, and young people are in fact very attentive to it. I am saying that it does not take the form of a judgment passed on the person. This is why I go through creativity when I am asked to work on critical thinking, and why I believe it provides a better media education than tackling the subject head-on, which I developed in Media and AI education through creativity.
Assessing a journey
School assesses the attainment of the institution’s objectives, not the development of a person. This inversion seems to me to be the crux. In any educational setting, what counts is the path the person travels, not the right answer they ended up giving. And that path, in the end, no one can measure. What each person has learned in a shared experience, we know nothing of; it may resurface years later. The only thing an adult can honestly evaluate is the framework they set up, the place they gave to others, the quality of their listening.
I am not unaware of the difficulty. A society needs benchmarks, certifications, moments when it is attested that something has been acquired, and I do not claim to know how to refound all that at the scale of a country. But we can already, in a class, in a workshop, in a project, distinguish what belongs to attestation from what belongs to accompaniment, and refuse to let the second be contaminated by the first. I have proposed ways of doing so in The question of criteria and in Validation is not transformation.
Images have their place in this undertaking, because they are one of the rare school terrains where you can do something without being graded for having done it.
