To win, to succeed, to be successful in schooling mean in this paper to be fulfilling the desires of the institution, and to fail then, is precisely not to live up to the expectations of the institution. That is the institutional expectations are intrinsic to the very idea of schooling and the individuals' abilities to respond to those expectations, to inhabit them as if part of the very constitution of self, is the foundation of success and consequently of failure. Such self, as the paper, will show take the shape of an authentic representation of how the institutions think itself, founded on a particular understanding of what constitutes education and educational thought. The paper will show that rather than accepting the authentication function of schooling producing authentic/inauthentic lives, of gold and waste (Bauman 2004), education proper is to challenge the very idea of an authentic self. The paper will be doing so by embracing the ‘failure’ of the early Sophists to live up to the demands of a science-based education introduced by Plato and Aristotle (Jaeger 1939, 1943, Bloom 1991), by taking the position of the inauthentic self, the other of such education. The strategy that will be used then is one of asking one question too many, to be drawing one consequence too many (Cassin 2014, 2016, 2020), to be exceeding the limits of schooling proper. Such strategy, as developed in full in the paper, explores the exact point at which the inside and the outside of schooling coincide and failure appears, and the exact point where education is possible as something else than domination and control.

Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcast. Oxford: polity press. Bloom Bloom, A. (1991). The Republic of Plato. Basic Books Cassin B. (2020). Jacques the Sophist. Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Fordham University Press. Cassin, B. (2016). Cassin, B. (2016). Nostalgia. When Are We Ever at Home? New York: Fordham University Press. Cassin, B (2014). Sophistical Practice. Towards a Consistent Relativism. New York: Fordham University Press. Jaeger, W. (1939/1965). Paideia. The Ideas of Greek Culture. Vol 1. Archaic Greece the Minds of Athens. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaeger, (1943/1986) Paideia. The Ideas of Greek Culture. Vol II. In Search of the Divine Order. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.