Philippe Meirieu

Philippe Meirieu is a researcher, essayist, teacher and pedagogue French reference, with a very prolific intellectual production and constant participation in the institutions and pedagogical debates of recent decades in France.

Specialist in educational sciences and pedagogy, is a professor of Educational Sciences at the Lumière–Lyon 2 University, where he has developed an intense research activity, especially in differentiated pedagogy and philosophy of education. He has also directed 49 doctoral theses and has written more than forty books.

Trained in Philosophy and Letters in Paris, he began his activism in popular education movements at a very young age. He has been a key figure in the dissemination of the principles of the New Education movement. He participated in the design and construction of the University Teacher Training Institutes and directed the one in Lyon until 2006.

Meirieu defends that the teacher must put himself in the shoes of the learner. In line with this conviction, he asked to return to teaching at a high school in the suburbs of Lyon, despite his university career, stating that Teachers cannot be trained without direct contact with students..

Featured works

Frankenstein educator. An influential work in pedagogical reflection that compares the figure of Frankenstein's monster with educational models based on the control and "manufacture" of the other, and proposes another way of understanding education.

Pedagogy: Need to resist. Reflection on the need to resist both the commercialization of education and the imposition of "easy solutions", defending a pedagogy based on the transmission of knowledge and the training of free and supportive individuals

What the school can still do for democracy. A work that explores the relationship between education and democracy, the values that schools can promote and the importance of pedagogy in fostering active citizenship.