Amores que matan: debates sobre el esencialismo escolar

Abstract

This article analyzes the defense of the school formulated by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, who conceive it as a space of non-productive free time. The hypothesis advanced is that this conception rests on a triple essentialism—nominal, rational, and affective—that fetishizes the school and obscures it as a technology that channels practices. The analysis confirms that this essentialism appeals to scholé as a myth, to the attribution of a rational capacity, and to the centrality of love as the ultimate foundation of legitimacy. This produces effects of reflexive impotence and blocks imagination in an accelerated scenario of digitalization and prefigurative cultures.The study is based on a theoretical-critical analysis that draws on history and sociology, Foucauldian notions of technology and governmentality, and research on cultural evolution. Teaching is considered as an adaptive capacity of the human species, prior to and external to the school, thereby questioning its naturalization as the exclusive habitat of education.The findings suggest that the emphasis on love as a source of legitimacy configures a normative shield which, far from empowering teachers, intensifies disappointment and impotence—particularly in a prefigurative culture where the symbolic centrality of adults is eroded, undermining the testimonial horizon of schooling.The article proposes identifying alternative ways of embedding teaching, suggesting three complementary paths: rejecting the school fetish through the historicization of schooling; mapping spaces where non-productive times emerge; and exploring couplings between school and post-school forms, assessing their effects on attention and equality of access to knowledge. It calls for opening educational imagination beyond mythologized recurrences in order to identify flows capable of sustaining education in its evolutionary, open, and contingent character.