The 29e edition of Teachers’ Week ends today. Its theme this year was: “Every day, we measure the importance of your role. I have tremendous admiration and appreciation for teachers — I think and hope it’s common knowledge. They are for me, as Bertrand Russell said so well, guardians of civilization.
Every year, during this week, I have a tender thought for the formidable and very young French teacher who taught me in Senegal. He taught all primary classes at the same time and he performed miracles! He was an illustrious representative of these hussars of the Republic trained in the demanding school of Ferdinand Buisson, the author of an essential Dictionary of pedagogy (I still consult him sometimes) and the father of the Secularism Act of 1905.
But before any call to celebrate, I like to remind myself of the crucial distinction between ends and means. Ends tell us what we want to value and why; the means tell us how we intend to go about doing this.
Ends and means
Take, for example, the seven-point plan just announced by the new Minister of Education. There are many beautiful goals that no one will refuse to try to achieve, but, alas, few concrete means of doing so. We’ll see what they tell us about it.
As far as teachers are concerned, their role, as we are emphasizing this week, is of course important and we know some of the essential ways to make their work easier and more pleasant. In particular, better working conditions are part of it: help for children in difficulty; less crowded classes; better wages; And so on.
But what is the purpose of all this?
My response is that we must collectively value teachers because they pass on to the younger generations important knowledge through which they will, ideally, become autonomous individuals and full-fledged citizens. A teacher does all of this and embodies it. Knowledge is in him or her, rich and alive, embodied, made desirable. It is valued in itself for what it is and for the pleasures that we do not know without it, that it provides.
I sometimes fear that we are not up to all that entails.
A certain utilitarian vision of knowledge is very present here as elsewhere. The use of the private network, as a means of easier access to profitable routes subject to quotas, is one manifestation of this. If we really valued knowledge itself and really wanted everyone to have access to it, we would certainly take certain measures here.
University life itself has not been spared, as shown by so many examples of the questionable links between research and funding, and as shown also by the presence of so many ideological blinders and censorship within of what should be the temple of knowledge.
In education itself, always at the university, the fact that for so long we have forbidden rapid access to the profession to people possessing real and essential disciplinary knowledge has always seemed to me to be the height of the scale of the negation of the intrinsic value of knowledge. How disturbing it has always seemed to me that in education, falsehoods are taught to future teachers (the thing is, alas, documented) and that the evidence has so much difficulty in giving it its rightful place.
All of this can also be found in the relationship to knowledge found within our society in the broad sense of the term. You certainly have examples in mind: these absences of nuance, these a priori certainties of knowledge…
I have just read the beautiful book of memoirs by Lise Bissonnette, made up of interviews with Pascale Ryan. She says there, on this subject, things which seem to me very correct.
Listen to her say her discomfort in front of these “new prescribers of good correct thoughts which are now rampant in circles which think themselves progressive”. Or deplore “the need to make room for laughter in all exchanges” or how we have “trivialized far too much a profession where continuous and rigorous information would still command the very first rank”. And talk about these “ideological quarrels, which are multiplying in the United States and which are infiltrating here as in Europe” and which “are unbreathable”.
But let’s go back to one aspect of the Drainville plan.
I would dream that at the end of this Teachers’ Week, we will be told, concretely, how we will put in place what will make it possible to train teachers in an excellent way in one year. I repeat: we are living through a national tragedy, and the increasing resignations are making it even worse.
So, concretely, who will take charge of this training and will be responsible for it? What will we teach there? How will we ensure the quality of the training given? Measure it? Follow up?
The intended ending is beautiful. Tell us exactly how we will achieve it.
For my part, I have put forward concrete proposals on this subject.