Like everyone else, I learned with great sadness of the death of Guy Lafleur, a player who gave us great joy. Lafleur was an inspiration, a man easy to love and admire: he was, without a shadow of a doubt, a national hero. As such, he will in a few days be entitled to a state funeral – and, one can imagine, to a few other posthumous honors.
Around the same time, a teacher at the Félix-Leclercme school confided that many of the students who attend there do not know why their school bears this name. Félix Leclerc, that means absolutely nothing to them. My interlocutor added: “It’s the same thing with Jean Duceppe, Jean-Baptiste Meilleur and others. The problem is that we don’t take the time to educate them on these subjects. The dunces are not our students: it is we who do not feed them by transmitting this culture to them. »
There is certainly a debate to hold on all this and what to feed the next course on Quebec culture and citizenship — and I will come back to this. But for the moment, the opportunity is too good not to talk about the place to be given to heroes in education, in the classroom.
The idea shouldn’t surprise you. After all, we are storytelling animals. And with these, heroes — and heroines — abound. We have known this since… before Homer.
But what is a hero, a heroine?
Much has been done about what characterizes them, for example more recently by examining people who fought against the Holocaust. You find in heroes things like independent thought, intelligence, a sense of duty; they act according to their own principles, if necessary against accepted community standards; they show compassion, empathy; they are intolerant of injustice; and they have a capacity to bear sometimes very great risks. On the intellectual ground, the heroes have what must be called genius.
By introducing children to heroes and heroines, we hope that they will discover these values and, through emulation, will be inspired by them. This — who knows? — could promote their commitment to others, encourage them to care about others, younger or older, less fortunate, and not just their family members. It could even be life changing and lead to a career choice. A phrase from Maya Angelou has always appealed to me: “A hero inspires people to see the good in them and to make it grow. »
ideas for the classroom
Literature is of course a vast reservoir of imagined heroes capable of producing powerful effects. Readers of Homer have always known…
Here is an example. What is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Paul Krugman in 2008. He often said that it is the reading of the trilogy Foundation of Isaac Asimov who had inspired his career choice: “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, he will say, and using my knowledge of the mathematics of human behavior to save civilization. »
But literature is also the place to tell real and inspiring lives, like that of Félix precisely. Sport is too, of course, and stories like Guy Lafleur’s have their place. In this area, it seems to me that heroes and heroines better take their fair share of light and play their part.
History is also a privileged place to tell inspiring lives. There will certainly be debates to be held on the figures to be retained and I am not getting involved in that here.
Rather, I want to dwell on those areas where our nature as storytellers — and our great attraction to them — is perhaps less called upon, but could be: science, mathematics.
In physics, recounting the lives of Galileo, Einstein and so many others is easily justified and can inspire young people: think of the struggle waged by the first – and at great personal cost – for truth and against religious prejudices; think of the pacifist ideals of the second and all that he did politically.
The story of Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) and the fact that her leading role in the discovery of DNA has been overlooked for too long is a great opportunity to talk about sexism in science.
It also happens that the work of these women is recognized, and that’s good. Think of mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) and the important work she did for NASA. Guaranteed success for whoever tells this beautiful story in class, which could inspire more than one.
There are indeed, in mathematics, many beautiful and inspiring life stories to tell. Heroism sometimes takes the form of genius and sometimes what is accomplished can be told like a story and be understood and appreciated by the youngest. Take for example this very young Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), mathematician of genius.
It is said that in class, the teacher, who wanted to have peace for a moment, asked his young pupils to add the numbers from 1 to 100. Long and tedious task. But Gauss almost instantly gave the correct answer. He had found an original way to simplify this calculation.
By guiding them a little, we could find with our students the way he had been able to do it.