The Limits of the Ideology of Efficiency in the Field of Education: Jacques Ellul and Simone Weil

This article investigates the topic of “violence” determined by technical ideology, dwelling on Jacques Ellul’s reflection on schools and universities. Ellul’s condemnation seems to foreshadow the knowledge crisis and the perversion requiring that educational systems be permeated by the assertion of the logic of efficiency, which results in sacrificing content and the ability to select, to verify sources, to elaborate divergent visions, asserting a self-referential reasoning that swallows differences and cancels “multiplicity” for the benefit of dogmatic interpretations. It may be that Simone Weil’s ethics of attention could help counter this shift.