René BARBIER (Université Paris 8, CRISE)
 

This article is based on my intellectual and spiritual journey during the last forty years and on my experience in adult continuing education, as director of educational courses educational leading to the DUFA (adult teacher educator certificate) at Paris VIII university over the last twenty years.

Adult teachers are educationalist who have questioned their own representations of themselves as  instructors, teachers and adult educators. They are essentially and functionally products of their society and of the education which they have received. So they have had to go through a kind of cultural uprooting in order to develop themselves through a range of human and social encounters, often marginal ones, with “remarkable beings”.

During this period of self training, they have learnt to question in different ways : questioning knowledge, questioning the know how, questioning the “know where ”, questioning the “know how to be ”.

Three types of doubts drive him constantly :
1. A scientific doubt regarding the knowledge which claims to express the human reality.
2. A methodological doubt about the “good method” for the adults he is teaching to approach their relationship to knowledge, to their know-how, to their “know-where” and to their “know-to-be”.
3. An ontological doubt questioning himself on his own identity and his own understanding of the meaning of “life and death”.

As educationalists, they try to express, in a radically dialogic way, these numerous learnings and self-knowledge. This radical dialogic joins on the one hand the meaning of meditation on non-thought and on non-being, and on the other hand the meaning of the culture as a product of numerous learnings : social, economical, political, philosophical, religious, scientific, artistic and literary.

In so doing, they become aware of themselves as researchers and “meaning handers”travelling along a process of creation and ending, a process of structuring, destructuring and restructuring the world.

At the end of this journey of actualisation and potentialisation of inner silence and outer activity, they transform themselves and reach a T point of being where they go beyond the wish to teach and to be taught, to merely be in the now, in awareness, aware of themselves and of others, aware of the world, and aware of life and death as a double indissociable mystery.

In this way, they become “open” to life as it happens, and so able to live in an existential poetry that is a constant life force for the better and for the worse.
 
 

Since the beginning of the seventies when I decided to involve myself as a university teacher in adult education, I never stopped questioning myself about the difficulties there are to give some meaning to this term of “educator”. Are adult teachers one of the shapes for tomorrow educators ?
 
 

THE ADULT TEACHERS ARE EDUCATORS
 

This designation might sound too simple, obvious indeed. But that would be misjudging the complexity of this term “educator”.
 

Educators are not instructors

Instructors, for instance military instructors, are not concerned about education. Their goal is limited and precise. They have to make known a kind of knowledge or of know-how, most of the time a very functional one, to a category of people regarded as legitimate addressees by an appropriate teaching system. Military instructors teach their young recruits how to lay an ambush and how to use a machine gun. Their purpose is not for thinking wether such a learning is well-founded or not. Worst, every discussion about this topic will be regarded as dangerous for the Army’s establishment. We had to wait a very long time to acknowledge and make legal consciousness objectors.
Even concerning their more technical sides, adult educators cannot possibly be instructors.
For instance, if they wish teaching computer technology, they will have to leave their mere technical function in order to recognise pupils not only as subjects dressed in uniform but as individuals resisting, or as suggests Jacques Ardoino, as individuals in ability of “negatricity”, so to say able to thwart strategies of symbolic violence that others try to engage against them.
Adult educators always mind about imaginary in its connection to knowledge. Instructors are only concerned with functional-real dimension in transmission of knowledge.
 

Adult educators are not teachers

Teachers involve themselves straightaway within the framework of a system overtaking them but which they are component factors. As teachers they have to spread a discursive thinking, an amount of knowledge, subsequent to legitimate cultural representations from a specific social group, on a particular time in political, economical and cultural history of an age. We know for a long time this “reproducing system” (Bourdieu & Passeron) does not fit today in its inner logic with legitimate addressees ­ those famous heirs ­ of this cultural fund. New pupils as well as new students don’t own anymore scholarly culture because of a lineage inheritance. Their subculture is of another order and mostly depends upon interbreeding cultures so often being depreciated, power struggle condition between social groups in a free enterprise economy, and upon the way they manage themselves to produce their own specific culture in their districts, with a language wich only them can understand. French writer and film-maker Alexandre Jardin asks good questions in his movie “The Teacher” (april 2000), but cannot really share those questions with us, probably because he speaks on too much and does not go deep enough in the dayly life of suburban secondary schools.
Teachers are more and more regarded like establishment system agents which expels more than it integrates, specially in the middle school. Even if pupils representations may widely be ambivalent concerning this issue (attraction ­ repulsion phenomenon relating to knowledge), teachers remain stamped by their position within establishment. To really become educators, teachers have to come up through the ranks and question the establishment, yet not falling into a fallacious friendship with pupils. Their training do not predispose them to this attitude reversal. You may ask agregative students, whatever field of knowledge they are in, in wich way they have been taught how to face “negatricity” of their future pupils. They will need much realistic intelligence and mediation sense to manage in their first job as teachers. They will have to realise than their very much specialised training, and very learned too, is not helpful at all to face pupils speaking to them with a cultural code absolutely unknown by its facts, references, gesture, behavior and language.
As a matter of fact, today the most competent teachers, academically speacking, are the less competent ones, in regards to the scholar and pedagogic order. Of course teachers holders of the agregation are mature to be research-teachers at universities, but they will have to train themselves and change their ways in order to teach at middle and high schools. Maybe entitled teachers, because their training at the Universitary Institute of Teachers Training will more easily manage it.
So adult teachers are not teachers in the strict sense of the word. On the contrary they might do their best to remove this image from its academic outfit. To teach adults requires a total questioning of usual image and practises of the teacher.
This approach is so true than, on opposite, adult teachers succeed very well at university once they get the cultural fund requisite in their own field. Because ­ don’t we forget-it ?- students are also adults.
 

What makes adult teachers educators ?

They are educators by their own training. This training is almost always transversal and transdisciplinary. Unlike experts, adult teachers train themselves more than they have been trained. Their training comes from many cleared up and worked out borrows. According to Gaston Pineau, training is not only academic and learned, stemming from right institutions, so to say in the nature of “heterotraining”. Training is also, and frequently in a significative way, resulting from a “night training”, a “self-training”, from occupational life, out of schools, but also from associative, syndicalist or politics way of life. Adult teachers have learned along their training process the meaning of complexity and of a relationship to knowledge wich does not rejects the very intimate questioning of their relationship to self-knowledge.
This “roaming itinerant” (french : itinérance) life allows them to meet people in their own context and language. They have learned to listen before talking, to recognise their ignorance rather than showing their learning. They have grown as “meaning handers” as I like remind it.
What are “meaning handers” ?

ADULT TEACHERS AS MEANING HANDERS
 

Adult teachers as “meaning handers”, along their many ways of training themselves, have exposed themselves to three kinds of doubts: a scientific doubt, a methodological doubt,  an ontological doubt.
 

Scientific doubt

By their experience, adult teachers are pluridisciplinaries and transdisciplinaries. Their many touches with reality have shown them that a single viewpoint in human sciences will never restore reality in its permanent and uncertain mobility. Exploration within different human and social sciences they had to undergo has dived them into doubt. Concerning a single branch of learning, they soon realised the diversity of trends crossing it, and the conflicts that drive it, sometimes bitter ones. Step by step, they got a view upon the trend of their branch of learning wich, in a single discipline, seem to them the most adequate to face facts in their occupational practise. But this practise has forced them to extend their viewpoints and to turn to others viewpoints and even to others visions of the world : non-rational, more imaginary and poetic visions.
Since then adult teachers contest every word of truth as know how to state some dogmatic learned. They perceive the real deeper and more complex than any scientific explanation related to it. Science, in the end, only gives an interpretation of the real wich it labels objective reality. But wich is objective reality in a quark or in baby’s attachment to his mother ? Or in someone dying in a few minutes or in someone’s affliction due to the loss of a loved one ? Wich is the science able to respond to such psychologic or material facts ?
 

Methodological doubt

Even more, how to approach human fact without betraying it ? How to listen and understand wich is a matter of the transcient and impermanent, a matter of the present moment ?
Soon, adult teachers realise shallowness of every research method in human sciences. They do not leave these methods, but they put them in their right position : one of confidence in finding one’s bearings faced with fear of the unknown. They know that adult education implies a non ending open-mindedness towards non knowing and non knowing-how. A taste for improvisation. A non fear faced with the other’s understanding.
 

Ontological doubt

The process leading them in the complexity of educative life questions them fundamentally. It is really an uprooting from every conviction : familial, social, philosophical, epistemological convictions. Sooner or later, adult teachers are faced with the reality of their own being. Who are they, where do they go, what do they really want ? What do they fear ? What do they try to escape from ? What kind of power system do they create and use in order to protect themselves ? What is this that make them run and claim to be able to teach other ones ? Whom and who legitimate them ? Wich language do they hold and for wich social function ? For which interests whose they are mere unaware cogs ?
Adult teachers leaving then their occupation because they have answered negatively to all these questions are probably the best and the most courageous. Maybe will they be the more effective ones in their’s children education ?
Because they truly become educators.
Educators aim to question others (and themselves) upon their way to concretely educate themselves from day to day.
Educate oneself is the acting out of facing oneself and reality. Educate oneself means giving significance to one’s own life by meeting and dialogue with the different knowledges and know-how belonging to the human cultural fund. Educate oneself also means to open oneself to self-questioning and reach one’s essential being through miseries and joys of dayly life and in meeting other and others ones. Even more, educate oneself involves a permanent dialogic between those two areas in education that remain in a kind of logic of the conflictual and complementary bipolarity dear to Stephane Lupasco : a questioning into the knowledge and into the know-how by self-knowledge and a questioning into self-knowledge by the knowledge and the know-how.
On this level, educators are beings in motion, always in a state of incompletion. All educators are bound to be in an ontological incompletion (french : néotonie). Becoming the authors of their own material, intellectual and spiritual life constitutes their fundamental momentum. The meaning of “authorization” as Jacques Ardoino conceives it emerges, to my sense, on a most important dimension : noetic authorization, or becoming the author of one’s own spiritual life pictured not as dogmatic or religious ritual demand, but as an unceasing testing of reality wich one never sees the end. One can see this process in action in many of our generation regarded as remarkable men, such as Carl Gustav jung, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, or Jiddu Krishnamurti, without speaking of many other people if we do agree to question them on this issue (Joëlle Macrez).
 
 

ADULT TEACHERS AND THE “T POINT OF EXISTENCE”
 

Every human being constitutes one’s own representation upon what is. Life on Earth remains very mysterious and one constantly pursues one’s abyssal depths. In order to do it, one uses means of technology, science, literature, art, mystic and philosophic thinking. So facing life provides foundations for one’s radical and ontological identity. Witout this identity, human being could never know the significance of life here below. This process of meeting world, beyond the fusion with motherly imago from infans is also a process of emergence of one’s own being. So human beings realise that everything is relationship and, as psychoanalysts say “everything is language” (Françoise Dolto). Every perception, every concept and symbol as well as every interpretation depends on the standpoint within a field of standpoints. Actually, the only way to know consists in clear-mindedly going into relationship and to stand this relationship in a bigger field of relationships. Pushed to the boundaries, the field of relationships is constituted by the entire universe. None constituent exists on its own in the universe. It is relationaly generated by a constant interaction with other constituents. So it is not only the constituent conventionally disconnected from a whole of constituents wich confers significance, but the system of relationships this constituent establishes with the whole surrounding, from the nearest to the farest. This epistemologic perspective generates ecology and allows to understand the relevance of some uptodated theories in human sciences such as symbolic interactionnism or ethnomethodology for instance. In a recent book, Gregory Bateson opening himself to eastern philosophy of life, speaks of sacred unity related to his ecology of mind. He gives a precise exemple of the fundamental characteristic of the relationship between objects in talking about a jug upon a table. It is a matter of crisscross of differences expressing only the existence of relationship and not radically of constituents wich seem to be disconnected.
But this epistemology is tragic because, as reminds us René Char aphorism “Clear-mindedness is the nearest wound from the sun”. Such a clear-mindedness leads on to non-knowledge about the world and oneself. One is and will remain for a long time a mistery in the world and for onself.
The “wound” one has to “cure” on the imaginary level is the obvious reality of one’s death and the vanity of one’s achievements and power upon the world. Actually, it represents a wound nobody may heal up within the field of thought. One has no choice but, as Athens stoics did on IIIrd century before Christ, stoically facing “Abyss, Chaos, Infinite Depth” (C. Castoriadis) and to stand. It mostly causes western moral and intellectual rout precisely because it centered almost the whole of its existence upon the denial of his wound.
But it is a wound “the nearest from the sun” because the suffering it generates is so powerful when one acknowledges it that it urges one to go beyond meaningless. We have reached nowadays this point of no-returnin our planetary civilisation. It is accurately what a zen master suggests with a koan or a mondo to his disciple. “Which is the essence of buddhahood ?” asks the disciple, and his master answers : “Cypress is in the middle of the garden.”
 

Representation of Life

On this eminently personal topic, every educator, every researcher in human sciences should probably accept to express one’s philosophical stand. It is upon this stand the researcher sets out one’s world and enters into relationship. It is not trivial to notice for instance that Gregory Bateson ends one’s days among a zen community, Rupert Sheldrake decided to live in India, David Bohm has written a book with Jiddu Krishnamurti upon the “limits of thought” and Frijof Capra has written “Tao of physics”.
To me, Life is organised energy wich at the same time is awareness. Not aware of anything, but being Awareness, wich means non intentional Awarenes. I am “not aware of” by my own will, but I am that very awareness as I rise up in the world. Living and being aware are intrinsically and reciprocally of the same nature. At the heart of this awareness in the world one can find a meditative attitude, an inner silence, even if western philosophical meditation, more based on thinking, is not useless. The highest living intensity means the highest intensity of awareness. Such is the way in any wisdom to realise it along one’s earthly life. As Krishnamurti asserts, we need understanding and attention to what is but not trust in ideas and in masters.
This Energy-Awareness is simultaneously selfless love and freedom, with effects of creating and destroying phenomenal forms in its permanent motion.
Living (or Being) is fundamentally dynamic and many-sided, wich does not mean that it is not One, as the ocean incessantly drived by currents and tides with an infinite number of waves. But it is not a “generic multiplicity” as Alain Badiou thinks in his book “Short Treatise of Transient Ontology”, but rather the Edgar Morin’s “unitas multiplex”. That dynamism expresses itself in a double process. On one hand, it actualizes potential forces ; on the other hand it actualizes working (actualised) forces. But in this double related process, nothing vanishes and nothing gets created. As Energy-Matter-Consciousness (E-M-C) energized with light speed squared, as Albert Einstein points out in his formula (E = MC_), Life, or Real, is since the very beginning in a everlasting movement of actualisation and potentialisation. In this representation of the world there never was any God as creator but imaginary. Big-bang, whose estimated dating (fifteen milliards years) poses problem nowadays to astrophysicians in relation to the date of creation of some early stars, is nothing but an epiphenomenon of actualisation in relation to Real, even if it seems it has generated all that we can perceive with our sophisticated yet inadequate instruments. There is no heaven, no hell. There are no intermediate worlds (angels, devils, various entities) but the ones we create with imagination. But it is true that if we do create them and believe in them, if we reproduce them by ways of educational systems, they do exist and do have an effect on on our organic, social and symbolic world. It is the reason why, as Edgar Morin suggests it, we have to understand and live with our myths and symbols. Most of the sects set up their authority on this belief fed with an assortment of rituals, of hierarchy of great masters, and of a spectacular and legitimazing decorum. On this level, sociology is the scalpel of the appointed sacred.
To exist consists in actualizing the noumenon flow of Life. To be born is the beginning of a phenomenal existence, of a new form, wich means a process of energy actualisation. To die is the ending of it, wich means its potentialisation. This energy-matter-consciousness, mysteriously and extraordinarily organized, wich we call a human being, so exists from birth to death by a set of energetic actualisations and potentialisations of the flow of Life.
Singular death of a human being, “intimate death” as Marie de Hennezel has written, in a first time (agony) sets up a remarkable condensation of existential energy wich potentializes itself as the living being goes towards one’s own death. It is the stage of detachment from the “things of life” that we can encounter when a dying being is aware of one’s close death. At the time of dying ­ this virtual point between potentialisation and actualisation of Real - , everything goes as if the whole individual existence would be absolutely condensed in a single point wich potentializes all and every actualisations. Then it is time for a possible break-up, a psychic “big-bang” wich would similarly actualize the whole potentialised energy. Tibetan Bouddhism fully recognises the importance of it, in the stages of its “Book of Dead”, wich implies the accompaniment of the dying by an awaken being. Is not it what experiment all those who came back from Near Death Experiences, those “experiences at death doorstep”, when they talk about a generous and powerful Light ?
Let postulate that the realisation of the sage one ­ Awakening ­ is becoming aware of this Consciousness-energy wich totally actualizes itself at the time of this virtual point experimented in its symbolic and psychic dimension in one’s stream of life. It is really the experience of the psychic death of ego. If awakening is complete, there is no residu. It is liberation, traditionally brahmanic Nirvilkalpasamadhi, reception of Nirvana, the achievement of the “thinking of non-thinking” (traditionally japanese hishiryo) of the “living-liberated” who, in bouddhist tradition, never reincarnates. Philosophically, he everlasting remains in noumenon universe, but how to label this “he” whom I am speaking of ? “That which cannot be said, better not to speak of” has written Wittgenstein in his Tractacus logico-philosophicus...
Some living-liberated out of compassion agree to delay their absolute absorption in Real to help the beings suffering because of their ignorance. They call them Boddhisattvas in eastern tradition.
Human love based upon craving is an expression of this double process of potentialisation and actualisation of Life. Desire is the driving force for attraction and repulsion, for pleasure and suffering, wich constituents are superimposed on one another without quite covering existential actualisation and potentialisation.
What attracts a human being towards an onther one is what seems to lack, but wich, in fact, is potentialized within one. The notion of “lack” in psychology of depths is related to the ignorance of ontologic reality. For the sage, paradoxally, everything is empty but nothing lacks.
At a certain time of their deepening, adult teachers do reach what I call their “T point of existence”.
It is a point of balance in the imbalance of any life in action : balance between body and mind ; balance between reason and imaginary ; balance between thought and sensitivity ; balance between spiritual and material ; balance between future and past in a reconstructed present; balance between temporality and instantaneousness ; balance between group and individual ; balance between external life and internal life ; balance between masculine and feminie principles (animus, yang, and anima, yin) ; balance between homo demens and homo rationalis ; balance between assuming absolute ignorance and relative truth.
Obviously, this state of T balance is only a virtual point. In real life, existence always trys to achieve this T point at the very heart of a constant imbalance inherent to any life in action. Facing desire for oneself as well as for other ones, facing the trials of life, the hazard of life, set up doubt and relativize every conviction in this field. Yet, adult teachers approaching their own T point seem to be spirited by a principle which I call “principle of sensitivity”.
 
 

The “principle of sensitivity”

Ther are different ways to figure out ethically principles valid in education. Hans Jonas talks about the “principle of responsibility” for world citizen. Ernst Bloch draws up the “principle of hope” to open up ourselves from social fatalism. Freud expresses the “principle of Nirvana”, the “principle of pleasure” in its conservation of sexual energetic.
Personnaly I set forth the “principle of sensitivity” for evrything related to educative situations.
It includes ten key-points :
1) Attention rather than intention : to take root in attention and instantaneous awareness; to develop an interconnected holistic, whole, complex and processive vision in every situation. To condemn every plan wich holds up to ridicule unity of the living.
2) Symbolic of life : knowing how to exist according to the logic of symbolic exchanges in the moment of relationship with the world and other ones : to give, to get, to return. To know how “to poetically live in the world” (Hölderlin, Heidegger).
3) To be stirred : agreeing to be affected by what is, witout a priori (beauty, ugliness, cruelty, godness...). The smile of the Joconde is magnificent, but the hedgehoggy shape of the aids virus is also of terrifying beauty.
4) To be one’s body : knowing how to observe sensoriality and imaginary (both delusive and creative) within oneself as well in other ones.
5) To free oneself from the fear of the unknown and to know how to play with humour. To understand the meaning of mytho-poetic improvisation as a way to go beyond anguish of death and creation of a human being open to life.
6) Not to be afraid of meeting one’s emotions (laughters, tears) when they arise, but with no attachment and without strengthen spectacular inherent to emotions.
7) To think about the diversity of life in terms of antagonist bipolarity and paradoxal approach (as also suggest Palo Alto, Stephane Lupasco and the traditional chinese wisdom).
8) To take unconditionnaly anything from other ones in a constant “compassion wave”, to be found in action, in right behavior and attitude.
9) To start with the principle of congruence towards oneself, opening oneself on mediation/challenge towards other ones.
10) To let come “The Great Blue” : to know how to live and meditate in the silence of deep depths without images nor concepts, before any action or speech.
 

Approaches on sensitivity

Sensitivity is to be distinguished from emotion, from passion and from feeling. One can define it very briefly by “what makes sense by all the senses” :
- the sense as universe of meanings existentialy incarnated and not susceptible of an explanation, but only of a multireferential and transdisciplinary understanding on the base of a personal involvement ;
- the return to the body and the five senses, to daily find “skin and touch” (Ashley Montagu) ;
- the ability to be affected, to be emotionally moved, to enter into emotional “echoism” (Jacques Cosnier) ;
- The ability to understand other ones and the world by co-understanding, by “co-natureness” (Jacques Maritain) because we all are made of the same substance despite our diversities, unity of mankind. Towards a vision holistic and linked up to life ;
- The ability to enter into a singular feeling including yet going beyond emotion and affect. A feeling regarded as integrative schema of any emotional trouble, by change of system of references, by moving off selfcenteredness and by the faculty to stand our position in disturbant relationships (Palo Alto) ;
- The ability to leave the “already known”, let go, “free oneself from the known” (Krishnamurti) ;
- To see the new, arising every moment, to be in natural spontaneity (notion of “improvisation” from Jean-François de Raymond and of “new mind” from Suzuki Roshi) ;
- To awaken to awareness wich is not “aware of” (as Castoriadis thinks following in Husserl’s wake) but a particular state of mind wich is without any division with the world yet being able to distinguish the constituents in a confused whole and to link up these constituents wich seem to be scattered. Opening oneself to the “oceanic feeling” from Romain Rolland. To rightly estimate the divergence opposing Freud to his disciple Lou Andreas-Salomé.
From this conception of sensitivity, three metaphors can be considered : the metaphor of the pair of pincers, the metaphor of the stone and the metaphor of the water.
 

The metaphor of the pair of pincers

Everything takes place as if the “principle of sensitivity”, considered under the angle of human sciences was held and tight by a pair of pincers whose two blades would be psychology and sociology, understood into their own historical development.
Psychology comes from a breaking off with philosophy and “mentalism” from the end of the XIXth century. It has been inspired by and imitates the sciences of nature and generates experimental psychology. But at the beginning of the XXth century, psychoanalysis occurs (at beginning it is viewed as “scientific” by Freud). All along the XXth century, struggle between clinical psychology and behaviourism (science of behaviour) is at its height. At the end of the XXth century, it is the return in strength of neurosciences in psychology and psychoanalysis is kept at distance (Jacques Van Rillaer).
Sociology comes from a “scientific” position with Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim which has removed Gustave Le Bon, françois Le Play and Gabriel Tarde. It imposes itself in France with Pierre Bourdieu wich takes over Max Weber and comprehensive german school of sociology.Then again, protest restarts with “history of life” (Daniel Bertaux) and ethnography component of the anglo-saxon school (H. Mehan) and of the ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel, Alain Coulon). In United-States, the beginning of sociology had been marked by the school of Chicago, then had known an eclipse with two fundamental trends : “the Supreme Theory” of Talcott Parsons, and “the abstract empiricism” of opinion questioners (poll) and “quantophrenia” (Pitirim Sorokin). Nowadays, the “return of the subject” (A. Touraine) and the “miseries of the world” or “counter-fires” (Bourdieu) do assert themselves more and more; in short, the voice of the actors, an opening towards symbolic interactionism but also research of the social in individual lives (Maurizio Catani).
That double crossed and complementary evolution expresses the ambivalence in human sciences in its relationship to the mystery of one’s being-in-the-world, especially to one’s human sensitivity. It is mostly a misappreciation of another intelligibility of the position of man in the world as it is developped in the East and more widely into other cultural backgrounds.
There is a paradigmatic hegemony of the western vision of the world. By paradigmatic, I mean a coherent whole of theoretical and methodological assertions depending on a vision of the world, an “epistémè”, with philosophical base, historically and culturally in relation to it.
That consideration bounds us to consider two metaphors and their indispensable dialectization.
 

The metaphor of the stone or the westernization of the world

The analogy with stone is appealing. Stone is an isolable matter, yet disposed to be collected and quantified : the “heap of stones”. It is a hard matter, able to strike and to destroy. It represents both the man’s first weapon and first tool. It is man’s first instrument for his will to change the world and to dominate it.
Stone is hard and steady. It allows man to get a foundation so providing him some security when it is huge enough. It opens to man a shelter (a cave). It assures man a certain eternity of his output (on this stone I will build my Church, says the Christian word since Peter, Christ’s disciple).
But stone is also a matter that hardly endure climatic hiccoughs. On very cold or very scorching weather, it shatters. It hates extremes, challenges, abrupt and incomprehensible changes. In the end it becomes a grain of sand, and its universe a desert.
The underlying paradigm for the metaphor of the stone and as well for the westernization of the world is one of fragmentation, of separatist crumbling of every living thing. Consequently analysis is its favourite way of investigation.
 

The metaphor of the water

Water analogically cross-refers a whole set of images. Water is the matter radically linked up and unified : no wave is “separated” from the whole of the ocean. A soft matter one can harn, put in a container, or even divert from its natural course, it seems to be obedient and weak. A matter for welfare, indispensable to any living being, it is required for one’s body and even for the very formation of one’s life to considerable proportion. A receptive matter receiving other elements, other liquids or solids for any kind of interbreeding., for the best and the worst ­ just think about pollution waste. A matter anyhow able to derive from an obstruction. A matter wich can evaporate itself and come down again as rain in another area. In the end, it is a matter more than unobedient and even sometimes hurtful when one tries to direct it, to tame it ­ let think about tidal wave, downpours, but also sprays as thin as a laser ray able to crack a concrete block.
In the East, the metaphor of the water is very often used within canonical texts from taoism and Buddhism. Let remind the famous episode when Confucius meets an old man whom, from the other side of the shore, decides to cross over the river. He vanishes in whirlpools. Confucius and his disciples think the old man is dead but he suddenly resurfaces on the other shore. Confucius asks him how he could manage to do it. The old man (Lao-Tseu ?) answers that he just followed the natural course of the river, diving into whirlpools, re-emerging according to natural bents of the water.
The underlying paradigm for the metaphor of the water is one of capillarity. It implies a vision of the world constituted with intercative networks in wich every constituent can be understood only in its inclusion in a dynamic whole, a field of relationships and an awareness of an other order than the “awareness of”.
That vision of the world has been developped since thousands of years through Eastern people, African people, American-Natives, through myths and symbols spiriting the many dimensions in daily life. North American-Natives are subtle representatives of it as delightfully shows Teri Mac Luhan in his “Barefoot on the sacred land”.
 

Required dialectic of the two metaphors

It seems to me that new epistemology, in West as well as in East, must go through a dialectic of the two previous metaphors in human sciences. Otherwise the disaster waits for us. Lastly, in altaic area from Russia, engineers decide to build a dam in deriving a river, without concerting with local people living on fishing and hunting. So they destroy their culture and force them to be pitiful tramps. One also knows what Edgar Morin says in ‘Earth - Homeland” about the similar history of the Kris Indian from Canada.
We must substitute western efficience at any rate for symbolic significance and community solidarity on a world scale. Ethnopsychiatrists such as Tobie Nathan are aware of this fact and use myths, symbols and body-practises from traditional cultures within their therapic action, in order to relieve suffering “cultureless” people from our areas.
One can imagine where this dialectic between stone and water would lead in the field of education :
- To provide steadyness and a relevant symbolic framework to any educative action.
- To agree to open up the way and to partly change the world with community action collectively developped.
- To be sensitive to cultures, to individual and collective responses, wich maybe conceal unsuspected treasure worthwhile for all and everyone.
- To agree to go by alternative routes, to refuse straight line.
- To take into consideration a temporality and a sense of space in new and other ways.
- To recognise and to consent in living not only with one’s based on rationality, but also with one’s imaginary and one’s myths.
- To remain adaptable before becoming hard-hearted and stable. To know how to “let go”.
- To think both earth and sky, left and right brains, in one’s vision of the significance of life.
 

WHAT THE TEACHERS OF THE PLAIN CULTURE CANNOT UNDERSTAND
 

Heralds of learned disciplinary knowledge and of erudite culture, great feodals since fifteen years arm their carabins towards educationalists and pupils from suburbs and elsewhere, those sans-culotte of the cultural field. They never consider that their own absolute lecturing word is maybe nothing but the reflection of an unaware and narcissic fascination for their own sound of voice. To this last one, answer to their pupils into a superfluous way, the unaware parrotry, the sardonic unconcern, the complete lack of understanding, or the head-on agressiveness as a way to resist. It is more than forty years than works from sociologists of the European Sociology Center have demonstrated useless of the lecturing methods in the transmission of knowledge. It is more than one century than educative movements try to give other answers to this failure. But nothing to do. Anti-educationalists persist to slander those trying to find solutions to academic failure. They only have the sacred word of “culture” (learned) in mouth : it is their host ! As Catholics during Inquisition, they want to impose their faith on the whole of the human community, if necessary by force. They forget that gnostics have known how to thwart this imperialistic strategy by a silent counter-strategy very effective, as well proved Jacques Lacarrière.
Great admirers of the texts belonging to the legitimate tradition of culture, anti-educationalists submit more or less consciously to the tradition of the holy text, as one can find in the great religions of the Book. Behind their defence of the french identity, or even the european identity, one can find defence of an archaic religious philosophy in the West.
In his will of intellectual power, Alain Finkielkraut, a leader of this intellectualistic tendency, during a lecture in Paris on march 30th 2000, violently criticized a book by Philippe Meirieu and Marc Guiraud. He pretends to believe that those authors want the destruction of school and negate the general knowledge, wich is a misinterpretation and an attitude of bad faith. He forgets to quote an other book by Philippe Meirieu, a newer one, wich sets clocks right. I want to talk about his book “Children and men. Literature and education. 1. The promise of growing.” In this book, Philippe Meirieu insists upon the importance of literature at school to assimilate the variety of cultural values wich make sense into education. One is at the opposite of the naive representation (is-it so naive ?) of Alain Finkielkraut in relation to educationalists destructive of the learned culture. I never met uneducated modern educationalists. I never heard a single insult towards learned and universal culture in their mouth. Most of the teachers involved in educationalism are great readers, very opened to the world. Often, by their comprehensive practise, they communicate this taste for reading to their pupils. This also happens with friends of Alain Finkielkaraut and I rejoice about it. I know that Jean Lescure and the young poets of his time followed passionately the courses by Gaston Bachelard at the Sorbonne. Who has not been moved in one’s libido sciendi with the courses by Vladimir Jankélévitch or those by Gilles Deleuze ? I do not think we can live in a world without any recognised history, without an asserted general culture. One has a duty of memory to spread, but how to succeed in this achievement nowadays: such is the modern educative stake.
Of course, a recent book by Marie-Danièle Pierrelée ­Why do your children bore themselves at school -, prefaced by Philippe Meirieu, very much criticized by Alain Finkielkraut in the aforesaid lecture ­ suggests to reduce hours of lecturing courses dedicated to the learned culture at the benefit of hours of listening and practises linked with daily interest of the children in the present context. But it is not to get rid of the learned culture, just to re-articulate it, even through criticism, with modernity and everyone real condition. If Alain Finkielkraut had, only once in his life, taught on a long-term at university in the capital outskirts, and not only at Polytechnic School, he would know that we cannot anymore spread the universal Culture according to rules still prevailing in classes training for high schools. Young assistants in higher education begin to realise it, into their universitary training, in the CIES (Initiation Centers to Higher Education), a sI can hear nowadays as their teacher. One can regret it, but it is a fact and we are bound to invent a different education. It is not less rigorous and it requests us much more energy and time. But, even more, an education of this nature necessarily implies to think about citizenship. Not on a purely abstract way, but into a conflictual and risky practise. Because nothing is won on advance. The strength of some media, of some mafiosi opinions, spreading their strenght-conceptions concerning easy money, sex and social legitimatization through a show-policy, in short “the growth of triviality” (C. Castoriadis), never stopped to be fought by the difficult practise, even dangerous one, of active education.
 

THE NOTION OF “STRUCTURE OF FORMATIVE LIFE”
 

Educators or adult teachers start by generating a feeling of confidence and user-friendliness into the group they manage. They have to invent a “structure of life” with everyone contribution. Without institutionalize it, no symbolic exchange can develop their inventiveness.
The notion of “structure of life”, as suggested by Daniel J. Levinson, presently seems to be a key-concept, as well in adult training than in basic training. I have always been careful, in the groups of this “existential research-training” I have conducted, to focus on this question.
In his book “The Seasons of Man’s Life” analysed by Canadian Renée Houde, D. J. Levinson definites the structure of life as the underlying schema of a given one’s life on a given time. More specifically submitted to significance of adults life, the structure of life includes occupational relationships and other constituents of occupational life, love relationships (marriage, family), relationship with oneself (bodily experiences, spare time and breaks, loneliness), functions in the various social contexts. These constituents may be central or peripheral wether they are more or less significant for the “self” in draining a certain amount of energy and time relating to this individual. For Levinson, the concept of “structure of life” is centered on the boarder between the “self” and the world. It is possible to regard it through three sides :
1) Individual socio-cultural side (one’s social class, religion, ethny, race, family, political principles, working structure, conditions and specific events such as 1929 crisis, war, freedom movements).
2) “Self” dimensions side (compromises with surrounding : desires, conflicts, worries, and so on, or to be kept out of things).
3) Contribution in the world side through various roles played (citizen, worker, boss, lover, husband, member of any association, and so on).
One’s structure of life changes by displacement of any constituent from the centre towards the periphery, of personal involvements (or the opposite), by its abrupt vanishing or its metamorphosis. Levinson identifies two major sources of change in a structure of life : maturation of human psyche and body and basic figures in the society. It develops through a string of areas and stages.
If we take up again some of the constituents of the structure of life during the “season” of a young adult in one’s beginner stage (between 17 and 33 years), and by expanding them, we can invent a pattern of “structure of life” disposed to interest teachers, educators and adult teachers and trainers. Il will include the following constituents :
- The dream of life considered as a “principle of hope” (Ernst Bloch) wich the individual maintains in one’s relationship with the world. What does he hope to do with one’s life (occupational, affective, social, cultural, and so on) ?
- The relationship with a mentor gifted with obvious human skills, in the relationship and intellectual fields, wich means someone the subject can refers to to lead his life, specifically in his relation to his own education. On this point, the adult teacher or the teacher should be able to be the one to refer to. Probably this mentor bears a resemblance with the “master” of teaching as considered by Dany-Robert Dufour.
- The relationship with a supporting group (parents, close friends) whom the subject can talk to and be supported on the material and symbolic levels.
- The relationship with a group of peers (the training group), to its cohesion degree, to its affectivity, to its ascendancy and its influence both positive and negative.
- The relationship with taught knowledge, the content of the training and the educative methods as well as human skills of the adult teacher.
- The institutional environment of the training-group (architectural and relationship, user-friendly and cultural spaces, provided by the training institution)
This whole of constituents of a structure of formative life establishes an involving imaginary more or less significant for the trained one. The adult teachers, as the driving force, have to regard it and incessantly develop it if they want toget an educative efficiency. This imaginary whole has to be listened and understood according to a logic with three dimensions (urges, social and sacred) as I intend to theorize it as “transversal approach” since many years. But the concept of “collective imaginary” linking together specifically the social imaginary and the personal imaginary, build up by Florence Giust-Desprairies in her book upon a new school, “The dreamed Child”, is also of the highest importance in relation to this issue. More globally, it is to the problematic of multireferenciality worked out by Jacques Ardoino along the years that refers to an education for the present time.
 

The question of knowledge in education

The question of knowledge propounds as a postulate four ways of linking with the world and it totally has to do with adult teachers as men in the coming :
- The practical knowledge connected with reality test, actual world, sensations, and based upon a living experiential building up the “known”.
- The learned knowledge wich theorizes the observation of facts according to scientific fund of knowledge already known and suggests patterns for rational intelligibility about the complexity of the world, multireferential if possible (J. Ardoino).
- The poetic knowledge expressing world of facts test from an open sensitivity and increasing it by ways of a radical imaginary (C. Castoriadis), and so unceasingly expanding the symbolic field within a given culture.
- The ontologic knowledge appeals to the being-in-world nature by a process of questioning based on negativeness, on non-knowledge, on vacant creative mind. In its more sophisticated forms it ends in Otherness (J. Krishnamurti), a state of bliss in wich the observer and the observed are inseparables yet unnamables on the level of rationality.
(René : ici le graphe)
expérience = experiencing savoir = knowledge
aventurier = adventurer émotion =emotion
connaissance = knowledge imaginaire = imaginary
poète = poet éducateur = educator
poétique = poetic désir = desire
sensations = sensations  sentiment = feeling
sensibilité = sensitivity intelligence = intelligence
saint = saint pensée = thought
 philosophe = philosoph
 intuition = intuition
 sage = sage
méditation = meditation savoir savant =  learned knowledge

Two ways of practising and five psychologic-life ways of living are linked according to this problematic.
The two ways of practising are :
- Practical experiential, put up or natural, allowing to face the reality test, the facts shock, the real over wich one stumbles.
- Meditation wich is the unceasing practise, arising from moment to moment, of attention, of the utmost awareness to the world, open to clear-mindedness and achieved in joy of being.
The five psychologic-life ways of living are :
- Sensations resulting from coupling together perception and action (of the subject onto the world and of the world onto the subject). They show the bodily and eco-contributive involvement of the human being, and they operate according to the duality pleasure/suffering.
- Thought usually signifying the sophisticated consciousness on the rationality level. The ability to put in order wich seems to be chaotic in an intelligible way, allowing one to go beyond the immediate actual through an abstract object globalising yet inevitably reducing. Its levels of acting are memory bound to the past, anticipation bound to the future and capitalizable knowledge.
- Intuition wich understands the content within the form with its constituents of suddenness and obviousness. It allows to see, in a kind of insight, the unitas multiplex wich Edgar Morin talks about, the holistic and unified nature of the real complexity, below the ragged pieces of the world.
- Sensitivity expressing wich gives significance with all the senses. The subtle ability in human being to receive the world impulse and to bring it back immediately, after a singular mental translation, through mediating emotions between the significance and the trace (Max Pagès).
- Imaginary wich is both the sumative output and the radical ability to introduce into a brand new way and to regard it into an unceasing mental flow, forms, figures, images, linked with the four other ways already exposed.
Six kinds of basic personalities can be emphasized  into this problematic, the educator standing at crossroads of their intercations.
- SCIENTIST, usually expressing a rational thought to explain, understand or interpret the world from a strategy of collection of data, hypothesis, and a pattern of research.
- PHILOSOPH, in its western meaning, attributing, from a methodical doubt and a constant curiosity, intelligible and theorized meaning to the relationships between the man and the world.
- SAGE, representing the one who knows that he does not know, and who speaks not much or using aphorisms, metaphors or suited tales.
- SAINT, the traditional mystic, expressing himself from an oblative love closely linked to a very high sensitive ability.
- POET, who makes one see (P. Eluard) the world into his work but on a symbolic level, always many-meaningful, ambiguous, ambivalent and gifted with an over-meaning intended to be sensitively deciphered by one’s own imaginary structure.
- ADVENTURER, moved by a fundamental curiosity and perfectly representing the being of wandering ; wich means the one playing the game of the man as microcosm of the game of the world, to take up the words of the modern Greek philosoph Kostas Axelos.