While disciplining the energies of the young in harmony with the norms and goals of a given community has often been repeated as the purpose of education, the character of the energies of the young is not always clearly understood. Beginning with a common view of the child's energies as a natural phenomenon, pre-existing the educational discourses that shape it, we claim that such an understanding cannot account for the claim that society makes upon the subject's identity through its education. In place of a pre-discursive vision of childhood energies, we consider desire, described in the work of Hegel and Lacan, as a thoroughly relational understanding of human motivation through which the subject is shaped by the human forces around it.
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