This article is about the changes to socialization modes that have occurred in our western societies since the second half of the 20th century, and how these changes affect the school in its mission of socialization and building the social bond in a modern world that is more and more uncertain about its foundations. Through teaching their own disciplines, transmitting knowledge and striving to reach objectives, how are the teachers contributing to building modernity, to the construction of the autonomous subject? After a theoretic presentation of modernity in relation to the search for the subject’s autonomy from both philosophical and sociological perspectives, and after showing how subject autonomy is inseparable from a deep reflection about the nature of the social bond in our western societies, the author shows how teaching history and science can contribute to the autonomous construction of the subject.