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This article deals with the feeling of an educational crisis and the increasing difficulties in teaching ; trying to go further than such assertions, I attempt to analyze the crisis in the very finality of education in our culture. The damage caused by modern pedagogical methods is often alleged to account for the crisis. From such a standpoint, one should go back to traditional methods of authority and transmission of knowledge. Rejecting this idea, I present the following hypothesis : the difficulties should be analyzed on the level of the educational principles. The French school system privileges the notion of emancipation, without précising its meaning : it may mean the emancipation of the individual through knowledge, political emancipation by citizenship, or the emancipation of the child conceptions. The problem is that the individual in his formation is led to obey new norms whereas the prospect of a collective progress has vanished from our consciousness.