The School of Life

Growing up or becoming an adult often appears in childhood as a kind of threat, a kind of inevitable fate which means a sudden awakening to all the harshness of what is, theoretically, “real life”, and taking on great responsibilities, the burden of everyday duties, and the sudden disappearance of second chances… Faced with this future, who would want to be an adult? Does the biologically unavoidable fact of getting older automatically entail transition to adulthood? According to Pennac, it should be accepted that the school offers a very frail bastion against the impositions of advertising and demagoguery which aim, not to shape citizens but to generate mere consumers. In order to combat this, he calls for a world full of passeurs: spirits who, instead of being unwilling to share their knowledge, are transmitters—passers-on—of curiosity and a thirst for knowledge to young people.