ABSTRACT
According to Illich, universal schooling was meant to detach role assignment from personal life history. Curriculum formation is rarely represented as a clear process. It undergoes multiple alterations before becoming accepted as an official set of documents, "debated at every foreseeable level of education, from local to national, informal to formal". This chapter discusses the tale of The Myth of Sisyphus that offers insight into the supposed social and personal necessity of self-esteem, especially as it has played out within educational spheres. The pervasiveness of the culture of positivism and its concomitant commonsense assumptions continue to exert a powerful influence on the process of schooling. Educators need to fight for an educational system that unveils and confronts these savage inequalities, which will cultivate and nourish emancipatory forms of classroom life, where a liberatory vision of social agency, empowerment, and self-determination can assist us in steadily dismantling the longstanding legacy of epistemicides in education.
