International audience This article traces the genealogy of a pilot educational project in a primary school of a Karen highland village in northern Thailand. The initiative, intended to include local teachings in the framework of the national primary curriculum, was associated with a broader reform of the Thai education system, focused on the knowledge and the protection of local cultures and environments. Throughout the various experiments to introduce craft workshops in the school or organize outings in the forest, this work explores the new modalities of selection, formalization and transmission of acorpus of "local knowledge" to young school children by their elders. In particular, it highlights the distancing process operated by the elders to translate cosmological conceptions and vernacular categories of land use in relation to the contemporary discourses and imperatives of natureconservation. In doing so, they participate in the transmission of an indigenous ethic of harmonious coexistence with the forest that bases the anteriority of the Karen animist relational ecology on the modern scientific methods of classifying protected forests areas while merging them. The school, seen as one of the main agent of the state integration policy and the shaping of the moral person according to Thai cultural values and standards, thus becomes a privileged ground to negotiate the rehabilitation of Karen identity and corpus of knowledge, for a long time disqualified by the Thai government and the educational system itself.