Abstract

By any definition of education, one of the primary functions of the school is to introduce the student to the culture – its knowledge. The question is how to make this exposure useful so that knowledge is integrated. What task should pedagogy perform? Is it to unsettle and disturb the students’ sense of self so that they can become à la Nietzsche, something other than they are, or is it actually to help students find their own centres? One does not need to be a psychoanalyst to see how individuals fixated on certain beliefs, deny all rational evidence that contradicts their beliefs.The function of the university makes manifest the master’s discourse in the field of knowledge, positing knowing only in terms of authorisation, justification and completeness. The teacher is the “Absolute Master” (Lacan) of knowledge, an omniscient knower to whom the student must bow in order to incorporate his/her knowledge. In this sense, after so many years of hard work the student appears as simply an empty head, a tabula rasa to be reshaped by the teacher. This kind of teacher actually contributes nothing to the development of the students, or to the development of knowledge. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. This paper seeks to bring about the actual state of affairs in the university. The deterioration of standards in the educational set-up urged me to study the attitude of some university teachers and throw light on the teacher-student relationship. I would like to demonstrate that the university has ceased to be a ‘society’ living in and through shared activities. Instead of co-operation, we find coercion, and teachers and students drift into an attitude in which each regards the other as an opponent.