EDUCATION AND POLITICS

the maximum authority with minimal power

Abstract

This article addresses a question of our time: how much power has the education, in a world
where everything seems turned upside down – politics, sources of legitimacy, symbolic
systems and values, forms of social bonding, languages, relations between cultures -, a world
in which education and training are becoming increasingly privatised assets subservient to the
needs of the neoliberal system? I propose a new alliance between education and politics, by
delivering both from the meanings and practices today hegemonic centered on the power, and
redefining them in the horizon that competes with them, that of the authority. I propose a
meaning of authority regained to its female roots by politics and thought of sexual difference
developed especially in Italy, Spain and France, which orients us in the world according to the
criterion of "the maximum of authority with the minimum of power". Then the shifting line of
the link between education and power, and between power and politics, can move towards the
authoritiy, understood as "capacity to increase" and to give new possibilities to the world and
to the human singularity, because this line passes through us in the first person in relationship
with others. Under these conditions we are able to produce effects in the reality of which we
are part, being active players in modifying contexts and relations as well as in regenerating
and enriching public life.