If we give credit to the hypothesis that hatred of the other is always, in one way or another, self-hatred, if one accepts the idea that the sovereign detestation of one's self, Others are a form of self-contempt, so it is urgent to place the issue of self-esteem at the heart of the educational project of the school. We organized this text in three sections. In the first section, we explain the notion of self-esteem, we do it with the words of Ricoeur. In the second section, we describe the lines of force of a teaching ethic centered on the student's self-esteem and show how it ties three great virtues (justice, solicitude and tac). In the third and last section, we show that exemplarity, the necessary professorial exemplarity, may be thought of as an ordinary example. Happy paradox, ethics for difficult times is not a supererogatory ethic, it does not require either holiness or heroism.