The lesson/lecture, as imagined by Gustavo Zagrebelsky, is both a part of every-day life and the culmination of the path to knowledge. It is a time and a place for friendship – the filía - for both students and teachers. “The lesson/lecture is like a call to gather around knowledge.” It brings together different people and different words: It is in fact a ‘house of words’, words with which teacher and students create the world by naming it.

The lesson is experienced together, like a walk among friends. Friends of knowledge, in particular. The teacher, inevitably, has to entice their pupils to like the subject they are treating. During the lesson, one is “fascinated” if one has a “desire” to participate “with joy, emotion, fear, restlessness, in short: with understanding and feeling.” In class, no one can simply repeat by heart if they are serious. Neither the students nor the teacher. Everyone, each for their part, must participate in the research process. The class develops by itself, with pauses, digressions, interventions by some students, and then picks up the thread, the path again.

The living organism of the “class” is society in miniature, and so “the construction of the class can be seen as a herald, a promise, an image of the society we want to build: competitive, discriminatory, violent or cooperative, egalitarian, friendly.” What school basically requires is to see oneself in a utopian way, as something to work on ceaselessly, knowing that perfection is unattainable. Only then is it worth being strict. And, when necessary, heretical.