Читать книгу Open Innovation - Pascal Latouche - Страница 21

G2J’s school years were not easy. It seems today that he was a very industrious child. “School was a pain for me!”. It took him six years to complete his studies from 9th grade (aged 14) to 11th grade (aged 16), taking each class twice. This gives you an idea of G2J’s ordeal as a child. As a child, you must want to be and be recognized. Your grades, teacher ratings are just a few of the many ways you can be proud of yourself. But for G2J, the journeys marked out were just an antithesis of his deepest sense of self.

School predestines us, based on grades, to allow ourselves to do things or not to do things, or at least to believe that we can or cannot do them. Imagine that from the 6th grade (aged 11), a whole educational system is there to tell you in substance that you won’t make it to the 9th grade (aged 14) and that if by chance you make it, receiving the BAC diploma, you shouldn’t dream. An ordeal that is likely to break a young spirit and ruin his life. G2J was telling me that someone he knew talked about school as “learned helplessness”. How to give a child the intimate conviction of being useful or useless, or even to comfort or panic him about his own future, and this on a completely simplistic basis: his grades.

This was G2J’s fate: “I had my bag on my back without knowing where to find it”. This picture is very beautiful. He had in a well-defined object (his backpack) the knowledge (his books). This knowledge he carried on his back as a burden that he could not access, because it was not in front of him. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there. He wanted it, and the young G2J was going to develop on his own in his corner the means to grasp this knowledge.