The biannual review of ideas Argument has been advocating for general culture for over 25 years. Its issues, in book format and always robust, call on thinkers and intellectuals who cultivate as much concern for style as that of subject matter. Argument, in other words, always flies high, offering in-depth debates that avoid low polemic. In its pages, we think instead of delivering blows.
It is therefore not surprising that the journal, in its fall-winter 2023-2024 issue, once again defends general education in CEGEPs and more particularly philosophy and literature courses.
The relevance of this training, which also includes compulsory English and physical education courses, has often been called into question. Philosophy and literature courses are accused of being outdated — do we have any idea, in 2024, of still reading Plato, Molière and Germaine Guèvremont? — and harm graduation, especially in technical programs. At the end of this trial, we therefore propose to abolish this training or, at least, to reform it.
Let us immediately settle the case of the second element of the accusation. To date, no serious studies support it. Students who fail philosophy and literature also do not do particularly well in their special education courses. If they drop out, it is not because of Aristotle or Nelligan, but because of a lack of interest in studies in general or because they found a job.
Is the first charge, that is to say the outdated nature of philosophy and literature courses, any more admissible? In any case, this is what the Quebec College Student Federation (FECQ) put forward by calling, in March 2023, to “dust off” and update general education, while pleading for a more diversified course offering. , which would allow students free choice. This numberArgument is intended as a response to this plea.
College philosophy professor, Sébastien Mussi is rightly surprised by the FECQ’s argument. “It is difficult to see,” he writes, “how questioning the human condition could become obsolete. » Because philosophy, he continues, is that: asking questions about reality, about life, about death, about love, about anguish, about the meaning of all that and about the answers that today’s power, “that of the market”, he specifies, is trying to impose on us.
In this operation, explains Mussi, the detour into the past, through our great predecessors, proves essential. By freeing us from the weight of the immediate present, it allows us to discover that “our truths […] have a history”, that there is nothing natural or immutable about them, and that they must therefore always be subjected to a critical eye so as not to transform into dogmatic illusions.
“Accessing the historical depth of world views is thus a privileged path to emancipation from the dogmas of the present,” notes Dominique Lepage, also a philosophy professor. At a time, she continues, where diversity is popular, historical distance should be valued and not neglected because it “educates us to enter into contact with humans who are both different from us and similar to us, to approach the different, to pay attention to it, truly, to position oneself in relation to it.”
This is also one of the reasons why I deplore the absence of a Quebec history course in general college education. The Parti Québécois, during its brief stint in power in 2012-2014, attempted to add such a course to the compulsory program, but actors in the network — teachers, unions, directors, Superior Council of Education — put it on hold. so many obstacles in the wheels that the project aborted.
A thousand arguments could be invoked to plead in favor of a solid general education at college and at all levels of education. I want, more simply, to go with an unstoppable argument of authority. All the great thinkers of history, in fact, philosophers, writers and historians, of course, but also scientists, like Einstein, have praised it, recognized their debt to this training focused on culture general. That says a lot about its importance.
In this issue ofArgument, which also contains a very nice interview with the filmmaker Bernard Émond, the literature professor Jean-Marc Limoges expresses a quack by emphasizing that philosophy and literature courses at college, because they are often flatly given, do not succeed always transmitting the passion for these materials. He’s not wrong. Even the essential, in fact, needs brilliance to charm.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.