Debates on Education: Exploring the Clash between Positive Education and Imposed Limits

While the debates around the education of children resurface for the umpteenth time, “Liberation” looked at the methods advocated by two media figures of the moment, whose oppositions crystallize around the concept of positive education. What if we let parents breathe?

Debates on education are eternal sources of conflict and many parents look in vain for the martingale to make a successful entry into their children’s lives. And to feel guilty continuously under the fire of injunctions or contradictory advice. They would be too authoritarian, Third Republic style, gray coat and ruler strokes on the fingers, which is bad; or too lax, yielding to the slightest cry and imposing no limits, which is very bad; sometimes even both alternately and there, it is very very badly. The debate has rebounded recently under the impetus of two personalities advocating in the media two contradictory approaches, the psychotherapist Isabelle Filliozat, follower of positive education, that is to say benevolent towards the child, and the psychologist Caroline Goldman (daughter of Jean-Jacques) who advocates – in particular on France Inter where she officiates every morning since July 1 – the return of the necessary limits to be imposed on children. Passionate and endless debate that the riots in the suburbs further inflamed when Emmanuel Macron seemed to blame the unleashing of youth violence on the supposed parents “keep them at home” or when the prefect of Hérault gave his recipe to calm the rioters: “two slaps and off to bed”, which seems a bit short. “That’s what our grandparents did,” justified Hughes Moutouh (we come back to the Third Republic), which therefore seems not to have understood that we were in 2023. In this fight, do not count on us to choose a side. Not that we are slipping away, but everyone knows that a loving parent first does what he can, stuck between his own neuroses, his love life and his professional life, that he inevitably makes mistakes and that it is not always a tragedy. It is therefore good and healthy that the points of view continue to confront each other, without falling into caricature, so that everyone can draw what corresponds to them and what they intuitively need.