Guidance between two worlds: Holding on to the old or building the new

Bernard Desclaux (originally appeared on author’s personal blog, translated by Tomáš Šprlák)

As IPCC reports follow one another with ever-increasing urgency and France (and other developed nations) struggles to meet its climate goals, school career guidance continues to prepare young people for an industrial world that resists its necessary transformation. This contradiction exposes a central political issue: will education serve to perpetuate the industrial model, or help to surpass it?

Career guidance – a child of industrial capitalism

It is worth remembering that the system of career guidance in France (and other western countries) was historically built with – and for – the emerging industrial society. Vocational guidance appeared at the beginning of the 20th century to solve a very practical problem: how to feed the rapidly expanding vocational training system with a sufficient and properly skilled workforce for growing companies. This industrial origin is not anecdotal; it reveals the original subordination of guidance to the needs of productivist capitalism.

The founding utopia of guidance rests on what specialists call “adequationism” (matching paradigm): the belief that it is both possible and desirable to establish a perfect correspondence between individual aptitudes, training, occupations, and jobs. This mechanistic vision of the relationship between the individual and work flourished during the Trente Glorieuses, the three postwar decades when the productive apparatus could absorb both the qualified and the vast number of unskilled workers required for assembly lines.

Yet as early as the 1970s, the first signs of exhaustion in this model appeared. The oil crisis, the emergence of mass unemployment, and the tertiarization of the economy gradually undermined the supposed match between training and employment. Despite these changes, our guidance system has kept its industrial reflexes: early specialization, a hierarchy of pathways according to their proximity to “growth sectors,” and an obsession with immediate employability.

Ecology sacrificed to industrial logic

Paradoxically, while ecological transition is emerging as the major challenge of the 21st century, school guidance is still struggling to integrate this paradigmatic shift. The consequences of this transition on human activities, jobs, professions, work organization, and leisure remain unclear, and our mental representations are far from being deconstructed.

This blindness is not accidental. It reveals the inertia of a system designed to optimize the allocation of human resources in the service of industrial growth—even if that growth is ecologically unsustainable. How could guidance anticipate ecological transformation when it continues to be framed by the very categories of the world it needs to help us leave behind?

Take a concrete example: guidance toward scientific and technical fields remains largely driven by prospects in traditional industry, IT, or finance. But what happens when these sectors must radically transform – or partially disappear – to respect planetary boundaries? Is guidance preparing young people for the professions of the necessary transformation – downsizing the industrial apparatus, repairing its long-term damage – or locking them into the patterns of a productivist world that refuses to make room for the new?

Youth caught in the consumerist paradox

Delphine Riccio aptly points out the paradox of our time:

“Every day we witness a paradox at work. While the climate emergency questions our over-consumption, when we talk about guidance and imagining the future, it is above all an individual dream – the dream of a good job that earns enough money to sustain a life of consumption without lack. Yet natural resources are finite.”

This observation exposes the schizophrenia of our educational system. On one hand, school curricula timidly address sustainable development and climate issues; on the other, guidance still promises everyone access to a consumerist lifestyle that the planet can no longer bear. How can young people build a coherent life project in such a context?

This paradox is not a simple lag in adaptation – it expresses a clash between two competing visions of society. On one side, forces seeking to perpetuate the consumerist model by superficially “greening” it; on the other, those striving to invent new pathways to human fulfillment. The school sits at the very heart of this confrontation.

An OpinionWay survey for Edumapper reveals that 67% of 18- to 24-year-olds regret their orientation choices in France. Does this high rate merely reflect a mismatch between individual aspirations and the labour market? Or does it express a deeper intuition – that it is increasingly impossible to project oneself into a professional world no longer aligned with the challenges of our era?

Toward “eco-responsible” guidance – beyond greenwashing

In response, some advocate for “sustainable guidance” that integrates green jobs and the circular economy. Laudable as it may be, this approach risks reproducing old errors of the matching paradigm – simply replacing “future technological jobs” with “future ecological jobs.” It maintains the instrumental logic of guidance without questioning its foundations.

The jobs of transition – between two worlds

There is something even more fundamental. Ecological transition does not simply mean swapping “grey jobs” for “green jobs” in a giant game of occupational musical chairs. It requires inventing and valuing transition jobs: those that help us gradually exit the industrial world while managing its lasting legacies.

What are these jobs? First, those of active transformation: dismantling obsolete infrastructures, converting industrial sites, reorganizing supply chains, rethinking production systems. Next, those of repair: decontaminating soils and waters, restoring degraded ecosystems, treating decades’ worth of accumulated waste. Finally, those of adaptation: supporting populations facing climate disruptions already underway, organizing local resilience, managing sufficiency and scarcity.

Yet these transition professions carry a major political ambiguity. They can serve two opposing projects: either prolong the agony of the industrial model by superficially greening it – the notorious “green growth” – or truly organize its managed decline. An energy-efficiency engineer may optimize a factory to keep it producing – or to gradually reduce its footprint. A circular-economy expert may serve sophisticated planned obsolescence – or radical durability.

Are our guidance systems and their practitioners equipped to think through this conflicted complexity? Can they help young people understand that choosing a “green job” does not guarantee a real contribution to transition if that job ultimately serves the preservation of the productivist system?

A radical approach: civic guidance

In her op-ed, Riccio proposes a more radical approach:

“It is essential to support young people so that they can help steer society in a meaningful direction. As a place for building citizenship, the school is uniquely suited to become a space for learning debate and otherness if we wish to link democratic life with social transformation.”

This shifts the focus entirely. The goal is no longer merely to guide individuals toward ecological sectors, but to form citizens capable of collectively steering the transition. Guidance thus becomes a tool for collective emancipation, not individual adaptation to economic constraints.

From “I” to “We”: guidance as collective learning

Riccio calls for “fostering the development of an ‘I–We’ relationship between individuals and the collective” (Riccio, 12 Oct 2021). This seemingly simple formulation overturns the foundations of traditional French (and western) guidance, which relies on the individual autonomy of choice, the personal responsibility of the career goal, and meritocratic competition for access to prestigious career pathways. An autonomy that is largely illusory, since orientation and placement procedures greatly limit the real room for maneuver of students and families.

What would this transition from “I” to “We” mean in practice? First, acknowledging that individual career choices have collective consequences. The student who chooses finance over agroecology is not making a purely personal decision – they are, at their own scale, contributing either to perpetuating or transforming the dominant economic model.

Next, it means embedding in guidance processes a reflection on the social usefulness of professional activities. Do all jobs have equal value in the face of ecological crises? This question – politically incorrect in a liberal society – has become unavoidable in a world of finite resources.

Guidance as a “work of mourning for the lost paradise”

Riccio also speaks of supporting “the work of mourning for the ‘lost paradise’” (Riccio, 12 Oct 2021). This psychoanalytic metaphor sheds new light on our resistance to ecological transition. The consumerist model promises infinite material abundance, instant gratification, and emancipation through consumption. Renouncing that promise is indeed a kind of mourning.

Information about career paths plays a crucial role in this process. Either it continues to feed the illusion by presenting education as the gateway to the consumerist “paradise,” or it helps young people invent new forms of personal and professional fulfillment compatible with planetary limits.

This second path demands that we radically rethink our criteria for social success. Should we continue to prioritize the most highly paid professions—often the most ecologically destructive? How can we restore social value to the activities of care, repair, and transmission – essential to a sustainable society yet economically undervalued?

“Reflective spaces”: reinventing the pedagogy of guidance

Riccio calls for the creation of “reflective spaces” that would “facilitate the work of mourning the ‘lost paradise’ and enable young people to combine democratic life and social transformation” (Riccio, 12 Oct 2021). This proposal goes far beyond simply providing information about occupations – it envisions true laboratories for the future.

What might these spaces look like? Places where students collectively explore scenarios of ecological transition and their professional implications. Moments where they debate the ethical dilemmas behind career choices. Projects where they experiment with alternative ways of organizing work and production.

Such an approach would transform guidance into education for ecological citizenship. Instead of passively enduring labor-market shifts, young people would learn to anticipate, critique, and influence them. They would become actors in the transition rather than its mere beneficiaries – or its victims.

Beyond information: transformative experience

Yet these reflective spaces cannot remain purely discursive, even in participatory form. Information about ecological issues alone cannot transform deeply ingrained representations of work, success, and progress. Young people need more than discourse on transition – they need to experience it.

This requires a passage to the real experiences: participating in ecological restoration projects, experimenting with alternative production models, living sobriety concretely, measuring the effects of their actions on ecosystems. Doing transforms representations far more powerfully than knowing. A student who dismantles and repairs objects understands planned obsolescence in a new way. A young person who takes part in converting a derelict industrial site perceives the transition’s stakes differently.

Such experiential pedagogy questions the very organization of schooling. How can an education system still largely structured around abstract knowledge transmission integrate these immersions in reality? How can disciplinary learning be connected with transformative experiences? Career guidance can no longer merely steer choices among representations – it must now organize access to experiences that reshape them.

The necessary alliance: guidance, ecology, and ethics

Jean Guichard notes that reflections on guidance, ecology, and ethics must now come together. This interdisciplinary convergence is no accident – it responds to the emergence of challenges that exceed traditional academic boundaries.

Guidance can no longer be thought of independently of ecology, since career choices largely determine individuals’ environmental footprints. Nor can it ignore ethics, as it engages each person’s responsibility toward future generations. This threefold alliance sketches the contours of a new approach to guidance – more complex, but better suited to the challenges of our time.

This evolution curiously recalls the solidarism of guidance’s early days, though within a completely new social, economic, and conceptual framework. A return to the roots—or a Copernican revolution? Probably both. It means reviving the pioneers’ collective ambition while adapting it to the unprecedented constraints of the 21st century.

But beware: this convergence of guidance, ecology, and ethics must not become another empty slogan. It demands concrete transformation in guidance practices, training content, and evaluation criteria. Ecological and ethical guidance cannot remain a declaration of intent – it must take form in the tools, methods, and professional postures of counsellors.

Building a habitable world: humanistic guidance

“Building a habitable world that respects living beings makes sense,” concludes Riccio.

This truth—made more urgent each day by the ecological crisis—reframes all our educational practices. Guidance can no longer be a service for placing individuals into the existing productive apparatus; it must contribute to the collective invention of a new social model.

This humanistic approach to guidance is not a pedagogical utopia. It is a political choice: to place the school in the service of transformation rather than the reproduction of the industrial model. In a finite world, the infinite orientation of individual desires has become meaningless. Only a collective orientation of effort toward sustainability can still make sense.

Are we ready to abandon the comforting certainties of the matching paradigm and explore the uncharted territories of ecological and democratic guidance? Will we accept to transform guidance from an instrument of social reproduction into a tool of collective transformation? The answers will come only through action.

Guidance now faces a historic choice: to continue preparing young people for an industrial world that refuses to die – or to accompany them in inventing a post-industrial world struggling to be born. Between these two worlds, current guidance hesitates, dithers, and multiplies its green discourses without changing its practices. This hesitation cannot last. The young people of 2025 will live most of their lives in the second half of the 21st century – when the consequences of climate change will be fully felt. Preparing them for “good jobs” in the old world is to condemn them to unfitness. Preparing them to build the new world is to give them a chance.

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