It was World Philosophy Day last Thursday. You probably know it: I fought a lot to make education the important place that it deserves to evidence. But the philosopher that I am knows perfectly well that they do not say everything and that other disciplines are necessary to correctly think about education and its practice.
I have always maintained that among them, philosophy should occupy a prominent place.
Deprived of it, we lack important cultural and historical landmarks that help to understand how the major and unavoidable questions relating to the nature and purposes of education were asked.
In addition, the often subtle distinctions made by all these vast disciplines of philosophy (epistemology, ethics, anthropology, and others…) have concrete implications that their application to a complex practice such as education reveals.
Finally, this concern for conceptual clarification of philosophy applied to crucial concepts in education (education, of course, but also many others such as autonomy, knowledge, indoctrination, curriculum, etc.), which are often used without a critical perspective, is another valuable contribution of philosophy to education.
One should not have been trained to teach without having a vast knowledge of all this, which as a bonus nourishes a healthy critical distance from current affairs.
We will have an idea of some aspects of Alain’s thought that encourage reflection and, if necessary, to say why we disagree with him.
Alain and education
Alain is the pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951). The literary form most commonly adopted by him, and which will make his fame, is that of the “subject”, a short journalistic post covering the whole range of possible subjects in which, each time, he offers, precisely, to the general public, a reflection, and more precisely an exercise of judgment.
Alain’s pedagogical reflection is notably exposed in his About education, collected and published for the first time in 1932.
It is animated by a deep rationalism and all the effort of the philosopher aims to promote in each of us the exercise of free judgment. “There is no thought except in a free man,” he writes, “in a man who has promised nothing, who withdraws, who becomes solitary, who does not concern himself with pleasing or displeasing. The big business is to preserve the autonomy of “spiritual power”, the one that founds and makes possible human dignity, against “temporal powers”. “The individual who thinks against the society that sleeps, that is eternal history,” he wrote.
Education should teach people to judge well, and this requires overcoming the false perceptions of the imagination or of accepted opinion (“To think is to say no”, writes Alain), the forces of the passions (“Desire is lazy ”and“ To really want is to want what one does not want ”) and all tyrannies (“ The mind must never obedience ”).
But the school also operates according to its own logic because it is aimed at new minds. It is precisely its precise mission to train them and to “force them to think”.
However, Alain has a particular idea of childhood. Childhood is indeed for him the moment when the mind still confuses the possible and the impossible, the real and the dream, it is a state which maintains a magical relationship to a world which would be inhabited by wills that are in turn benevolent. and malicious. Against this myth of “Aladdin’s lamp”, the school brings out childhood, magical thought, by discovering the resistance of the object and the real; it teaches the law of effort and will. Alain writes: “Schoolwork is a test for character. Whether spelling, versioning or calculating, it’s about overcoming the mood, it’s about learning to want […] Examinations are exercises of will. And in this they are beautiful and good. “
The defense of this altogether traditional conception of the school, of an education and a pedagogy based on work, rigor, effort and will, is deployed in Alain in parallel to a fierce criticism of new pedagogies. focusing on the picturesque, the attractive, the interesting, the pleasant: “Rocking is not educating”, writes Alain.
This difficult work that education must accomplish can however be based on a powerful spring in that childhood aspires to this exit from childhood to which school invites it. The child wants to be the adult, assures Alain, to the point of despising the adult who makes the child. From there, the whole art of the educator is to nurture this ambition of the child by proposing models to his admiration. The art of the educator is also that of graduating the stages by offering the child trials that he can overcome and victories which will in themselves be their own reward.
This pedagogy is therefore also based on a philosophy of childhood which defines it less in terms of what it is than in terms of what it should allow the advent. At the injunction of so many people who claim that we must know the child in order to teach him, Alain replies that it is also and even a lot by teaching him that we will know him, and that it is precisely by teaching him to sing that we will know if he is a musician.
I am of the opinion that all this suggests …