At the limit of the impossible: the reverse side of education

Abstract

This article offers a philosophical reading of education from its reverse side, understood not as deviation but as a constitutive structure that reveals the impossibility inherent to the act of educating. Drawing from Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, historical-dialectical materialism, and feminist critique, it argues that the modern promise of universality and emancipation is sustained by systematic exclusions based on gender, race, class, territory, and language. Beneath the appearance of neutrality, the school functions as an ideological apparatus that reproduces social inequalities and silences subjects who do not conform to the Enlightenment ideal. Psychoanalysis places education among the “impossible professions”; historical materialism exposes its role in the reproduction of the social order; and feminism denounces the patriarchal nature of the modern universal subject while affirming insurgent epistemologies. Within this framework, formative failure is not a deviation but a symptom of an exclusionary civilizational project and, paradoxically, a condition for reinvention. The wager lies in a feminist critique as a force that emerges from contradiction, dissonance, discomfort, and the margins, conceiving formation as an unfinished, conflictual, and insurgent journey. In this process, the act of women from a Global South perspective opens up alternative ways of living, thinking, and teaching, disrupting what is instituted and creating cracks through which the new can be imagined. The true revolution in education will not come through harmony, but through fissure: it is in what lacks, escapes, and remains unfinished that education ceases to merely reproduce and reinvents itself as a space of freedom and invention.