Back to school days are all the same. It seems that everyone is giving the word to ask the school to solve all their problems. Here, we demand mixed toilets, elsewhere to wear the abaya or to be able to be designated as a “non-binary being”.
School has always been coveted by ideologues. This is more than ever the case today. We could even say that it has become the outlet for all our fantasies. Not to mention the graveyard of these promises that our leaders struggle to realize and which, for lack of anything better, they pass on to school. However, do all these demands really concern school?
To answer this question, we must remember that we have taken religion out of schools because we live in pluralistic societies where religion is no longer a consensus. As long as we were practically all Catholic, there was little problem. The day when more and more other religions appeared, it was necessary to organize cohabitation. Faced with cohorts of atheists and agnostics, simple tolerance was no longer enough, it was necessary to invent secularism.
Today, there are Catholic schools and that is very good. It’s up to them to teach catechism to children whose parents want it. In public schools, on the other hand, to teach the history of this Catholicism as an essential and fundamental constituent of Quebec society. Which should also be done in history classes worthy of the name.
It took decades to secularize Quebec schools and extract the teaching of catechism. But have we done all this to replace religion with a new ecological, feminist, woketrans, LGBT or what else?
Not only should school stay away from all these ideologies, but it should “remain the inviolable asylum where the quarrels of men do not penetrate”, as the former resistance fighter Jean Zay, who was also in France, wrote , Minister of National Education. This is what should inspire us this back to school. In other words, controversial subjects which are the subject of normal polemics in a society have little place in school, which should be considered as a sanctuary sheltered from intellectual and ideological fashions.
This is what we call “gender theory”. As a doctor friend reminded me, science has long established that sex is first and foremost an unalterable biological data defined by DNA onto which is grafted a social and cultural construction inherited from history. Before overturning what all homo sapiens have thought before us in favor of a theory which professes that sex is a pure intellectual construction which everyone could decide at their leisure at each moment of their life, perhaps we should think twice.
If this “theory” has its place on the media platforms, it should be excluded from school. Precisely because, contrary to what biology teaches, today it is only a simple theory, widely contested among hundreds of others, and nothing more. To do otherwise would be to transform the school into a hotbed of civil war.
For the moment, on these questions, teachers therefore have the duty to put their convictions aside, as well as their identity problems which do not concern the school. In fact, what right does an institution like a school have to have fun calling students or teachers whatever name they want? In a normal State, and even more so for an employee of the same State, the name and sex of each person could only be those which are registered in the civil registry.
Teachers are not social workers. Their mission is neither to achieve equality on Earth nor to heal the entire Earth, but to educate our children as best as possible by treating them in the most egalitarian way possible. For this, a certain non-differentiation, a certain detachment, a certain position of overhang are necessary.
As for the student, he must leave at the school door not only his religious beliefs, but a large part of what we today pompously call his “identity”. Because school is precisely this place which should allow him to free himself from himself in order to better understand himself and, above all, to understand the world. Far from navel-gazing and small individual problems, school should be the place of self-detachment and openness, two attitudes necessary to make oneself available to knowledge. It is no coincidence that the Greek school means “free time”. This “free time liberated from the emergencies of the world which makes possible a free and liberated relationship to these emergencies, and to the world”, said Pierre Bourdieu.
It is not a question of denying the identity problems of some people, but school is there neither to deal with these problems nor to change the world. On the contrary, it is there to ensure its transmission. Hannah Arendt said it in other words. According to her, the function of the school was to instruct newcomers to this Earth and to “prepare them for the task of renewing a common world.” She was talking about a “common world”, not a fragmented world! This can only be done far from the fury of the world.