It is not new that the slope is slipping, slowly but surely, towards a significant increase in a certain rigidification of the regulations, frameworks and other standardizations of the living being lodged at the “periphery” of the school experience itself. Schedules more and more divided at the Exacto — we have five minutes maximum to drop off our children in the morning, more and more early besides (my daughter will have dinner at 10:45 a.m. this year… sorry?), list of school supplies with somewhat fetishistic appearances, imaginary lines drawn on the ground of schoolyards, beyond which we could be seriously penalized if we ever dared to go and leave a forgotten lunch box in the car or a last kiss.
If we have increasingly abandoned an authority expressed through a decorum now considered antiquated, one that included politeness, uniforms, formality and respect for a form of asymmetry between adult and child, my head de psychiatrist cannot help but read, in the current drift, a simple displacement of this authority towards a form of rigidified ritualization which now embraces the perimeter instead of the interior.
As if, no longer able to find its legitimacy in the teacher-child relationship, natural authority was now coming out in all directions, now overflowing into a thousand communications written in capital letters, in red and triple underlined — THE SNACK NOT IN THE BOX LUNCH — in a proliferation of prohibitions sometimes stripped of common sense, continually justified by “it will be chaos if…” or even the very gaining in popularity: “it’s a question of security”.
Neither conspiratorial nor anti-social regulation, without either wanting to accuse anyone, I am more and more amused, in fact, by what I would describe as sweet zeal. I may already hear you, in the distance, presenting to me the justification of the “good of the child”. Unfortunately, the latter has a very broad back – like that of the famous “self-esteem” on which I will return. In the clinic of childhood, it was worn down in my ears until it became only this thin translucent veil which no longer hides anything from the needs of adults, rather. All of these protocols seem to me to be “adultocentric” to use the expression I borrowed from the pediatrician Claude Cyr.
The defensive rationale for a system’s regulations often attempts to protect the needs of those who compose it, not those it serves. The fact of having gone through two systems from the inside, that of education and that of health, allows me to identify from tens of kilometers away those for whom the protocol provides the somatic appeasement they need to tolerate the anxiety aroused by what a more “direct”, organic, fluid, spontaneous encounter with the Other would bring. If I fully understand that a certain organization of things and people is necessary, I no longer have a very high tolerance for people telling me that it is for “my good”.
I find it hard to grasp, for example, what is good for a child to have to eat his snack at 9:30 a.m. and his dinner at 10:45 a.m. I sincerely think that this organizes something other than his rhythm , a bit like when evening meals are served at 4:45 p.m. in CHSLDs.
What is unfortunate in this movement, in this “craze of the norm” (term that I take from the congress that the Psychoanalytic Association of France held in 2016), is that it can end up stripping the ritual of its meaning, gradually becoming nothing but a frantic race of gestures which, if they take on the mantle of ritual, are no longer attached to the signifiers necessary for the transition to go well for the humans who take part in the thing.
Full professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning Studies at Université Laval Denis Jeffrey, in an article published under the title “Ritualization and emotion regulation” in the journal Companies, said: “the child of man becomes human because he practices rituals. His humanity is ritually determined. Comprising both gestures, but also a community and a reference to meaningful symbols for this community, the ritual accompanies the homo-before-sapiens since, it is thought, that it offered a first burial to one of his deceased.
In a Facebook post, the author Audrée Wilhelmy underlined how much, for the child that she was, the return to school was accompanied by a host of happy rituals. A lover of slow gestures, creator of a singular and fascinating aesthetic placing ritual at the center of things, she thus put words to this “lack” in what seems to have become for many people a bottleneck of time and space, much more than a transition to inhabit, celebrate and taste. As if the start of the new school year “entered into us” much more than the reverse, it has unfortunately, for many, become synonymous with anxiety, pressing very heavily on the universal narcissistic fear of being THE parent who did not send the TWO pairs of sneakers.
We are a long way, it seems to me, from a graceful repetition of traditions, bathed in a light filled with the particles of this dust of the end of summer, in which a child would prepare to reenter a microsociety of learning, of the deployment of him, of such a big part of his life as a child: school.