Is the mathematics education a problem for the school or is the school a problem for the mathematics education?

The purpose of this article is to bring school mathematics education to the Wittgensteinian “therapeutic divan.” School mathematics education is depicted as a “disease” that cannot receive a “democratic cure” in light of liberal-meritocratic projects that conceive of school as a preparatory cultural detour to a supposedly qualified insertion into social and professional lives. The recommended therapy is based upon a dialogue between Wittgenstein’s unsystematic, aphoristic-therapeutic, postepistemological views on language, meaning, mathematics, and learning, and Jean Lave’s research on cognition and situated learning