This study returns to the issue of silence in face of the social (dis) function of language in Education. We assume that the prestige of the narratives and their wide diffusion in educational contexts respond to a new way of social control, in a society guided by the charm of language and communication, supposed operators of tolerance as a desirable social value. We sustain that the lack of a more judicious treatment of the different philosophical positions regarding language ends up provoking a simplifying effect: the prestige of the historicist perspectives which establish supposedly metalinguistic truths and/or a popularization of the naïve notion of narrative self-creation. Two models that are in counterpoint to communicative transparency and where silence appears as a particular way of expression are briefly examined.: Merleau-Ponty in "The indirect language and the voices of silence" (1980); and Nietzsche in "Convalescence" (2000). Finally, we return to the subject of tolerance in Education in order to re-position it to the labourious place of the political struggle, neither transparent nor appeasing.
language; communication; silence; tolerance