Educate or adapt? James Hillman's critique of the pedagogy of performance

In today's collective imagination, education is increasingly understood as a process of optimisation: making individuals efficient, adaptable, high-performing. Schools are called upon to "prepare students for the world", providing marketable skills aligned with the demands of society and the labour market. Behind this apparently neutral rhetoric, however, lies a radical transformation of the educational function: no longer the formation of the human being, but the functional training of the individual.

James Hillman, the American psychoanalyst, essayist and philosopher, read this shift as a genuine pedagogical betrayal. The school becomes a gentle factory: it does not produce objects but subjects; it does not work on goods but on skills, performance and profiles. The human being is no longer a person but human capital in the investment phase. Skills, assessment, measurability, effectiveness and marketability shape the entire pedagogical imagination.

The decisive question is no longer "who is the human being?", but "what is it for?".

Preparing people for the world as it is means giving up any critical function. School becomes the antechamber of the market: it trains behaviours, drills performance, normalises adaptation. Knowledge loses its intrinsic value and becomes a mere tool: we study to get results and accumulate credits, not to transform the way we see. Whatever cannot be measured immediately, such as inner life, slowness, depth and vocation, is pushed out.

Hillman speaks of a subtle violence: it does not repress, it steers; it does not forbid, it normalises. It asks the individual to become functional before becoming aware. And what is sacrificed is not only creativity or critical thinking, but something more radical: the possibility of discovering who you are before asking what you are for.

Against the ideology of performance

This reduction has its roots in the modern idea of the tabula rasa: the human being as a neutral surface to be moulded. Yet many traditions, from phenomenology to analytical psychology, from neuroscience to pedagogy, have challenged this view.

For Husserl, consciousness is always intentional; for Merleau-Ponty, the body is the original condition of meaning; for C.G. Jung, the ego emerges against a psychic background that is already symbolically structured; for Damasio, the self arises from preconscious bodily and emotional maps. Here, the ego is not the origin but the result.

From this perspective, childhood is not a preparatory phase but the place where vocation shows itself before it is normalised. In his book "The Soul's Code", Hillman argues that children do not arrive as formless matter but bring with them an image, a calling. Vocation is not a rational choice, but what insists before any choice is made. The decisive educational question is not "what do you want to be when you grow up?", but "what is stubbornly asking to exist in you?".

The modern school structurally struggles to see all this. Whatever exceeds the norm becomes a problem. Inattention, restlessness and maladjustment are not necessarily deficits, but signals of an inner form that has no symbolic space. As Winnicott showed, an environment that rewards only adaptation produces functional false selves, not authentic subjects.

When vocation is not recognised, it does not disappear: it becomes distorted.

For Hillman, the symptom is not a mistake to be corrected, but a form of deviated loyalty to the original image. Distress is often the coherent response to an incoherent environment. Education that fails does not produce only ignorance, but split identities: a performing ego on the surface and a vocation relegated to the shadow.

Against the ideology of performance, Hillman reminds us that the daimon is not efficient. The inner form is not born to serve, but to become embodied. Authentic education does not push forward, it makes room; it does not optimise, it safeguards.

To educate is not to train: it is to accept the unpredictable, what has not yet taken shape. And perhaps this, for a society obsessed with efficiency, is the most intolerable risk of all.

To educate, then, means teaching people not to betray themselves, even when the world asks for something else: a deeply countercultural gesture today.

Conclusion: teaching as an ethical act

In the light of this critique, teaching cannot be reduced to a technical act. It is not the correct application of procedures, nor the optimisation of processes aimed at guaranteed results. When education turns into a technology for managing human beings, it loses its deepest responsibility: that of safeguarding forms of life that cannot be predicted, measured or controlled.

To educate means exposing ourselves to the otherness of a form we do not fully understand. It means taking the risk of meeting something we can neither name nor normalise, and which for that very reason asks for protection. The teacher is not the one who produces outcomes, but the one who responds: responds to the presence of the other, to their singularity, to their still unformed vocation.

Hillman leads us precisely to this fragile and decisive point, where the ethical stakes of education are played out. Here it is not about improving performance, but about not breaking what we cannot illuminate; not about correcting what deviates, but about recognising what insists.

Authentic education does not guarantee success, but the possibility of being true to oneself.

In an age that demands efficiency, perhaps the most radical act of teaching is this: to resist the temptation to make the human functional, and instead to remain faithful to the oldest and most demanding task of all, that of making room for a life that asks to become what it is.

Francesca Peruzzi, psychologist