The future holds few certainties, but we already know that if we want a happier, more prosperous, fairer and prouder society, we must raise our collective ambitions with regard to the education of our successors: education remains our only magic potion.
Posted at 4:00 p.m.
All societies on the planet will face the same challenges. However, several other countries will do so with larger and younger populations or with more capital. Others will be tempted by the way of their legions. Fortunately, our little village of diehards knows the recipe for the magic potion: we must encourage the passions of our successors, we must nurture curiosity itself rather than the particular object of study, we must encourage our students to aim for the highest peaks wherever they are for them.
Each year, thousands of our young people project themselves into the future and choose CEGEP or university programs. Do we really encourage them to dream in a fairly free and ambitious way? About fifty years ago, Quebec fully assumed this ambition at all levels: birth of CEGEPs in a humanist and professional perspective, creation of the network of Quebec universities in a perspective of collective development, establishment of a first science policy, development of many new departments and research centers throughout Quebec. In 1972, following the example of major American universities, the Université de Montréal established the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in a desire to encourage cutting-edge research and develop multidisciplinary training.
By bringing the departments of arts and letters closer to the departments of natural, human and social sciences, by decompartmentalizing knowledge, we have traced many improbable paths for exploring human potential.
This year, our faculty will celebrate 50 years at the crossroads of knowledge. Over the decades, we have supported the open-mindedness of multitudes of students who have become citizens, professionals and researchers who are building our society today and that of tomorrow. Like all academics from here and elsewhere, we demonstrate on a daily basis that all curiosities are precious and that all questions are fruitful.
However, collectively, we sometimes allow the urgency of the moment or the presumed economic opportunity to push us to direct our successors towards paths that are too narrow or dead ends that will only be reassuring for a brief moment. Let’s make sure that our concerns or our needs do not distract us from our fundamental challenges: our near future will above all require a bold, enlightened and equipped succession, whatever their diplomas or the nature of their questions.
If we really want to build the next decades rather than endure them, we must be much more ambitious with regard to the role of training for the community. We will need biologists who understand the diversity of cultural heritages, artists who reinvent the potential of the digital, psychologists who understand the differences between humans and intelligent machines. We will need mathematicians and historians, industrial relations experts and chemists, linguists and writers and many other translators of human experience and the workings of reality.
If Quebec wants to do well, we must continue to bet on training great human beings in various fields of interest and above all letting them roam freely in the fields of knowledge.
Feeding curiosity will always remain the best way to concoct agile and sharp minds, attentive hearts and formidable capacities for reinvention. Understood in this way, studies are not a simple chapter of life between childhood and professional life, and the diploma is not a professional predestination. Education is in fact a continuous epic of surpassing oneself and broadening our individual and collective horizons.
Humanist ambition? Yes. We must fully assume the humanistic function of education. No happiness, justice or pride without this greatness of soul and nobility of spirit. But it is also a pragmatic necessity. There is no long-term prosperity in Quebec without creativity, curiosity, ingenuity and passion.
The future will not be comfortable for the cautious and so we must be brave and optimistic about the potential of our youth. Choose between the heart and the reason? Between the useful and the pleasant? Between the gaze of the artist and the reading of the scientist? Quebec has known for a long time that these are false dilemmas. Do we want young people who live their passions while acquiring skills. Let’s accompany these young people who understand in their guts that there is no useless knowledge except that which is not shared. Let’s rediscover the excess and the ambition to train generous and determined human beings, whatever their appetites. Let us remember our responsibility to form human beings greater than ourselves.
And as if by magic, as empires collide, Quebec will chart a path that all of humanity could wish to follow with us.