The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
In a recent interview he gave to DutyAndreas Schleicher, who heads the section devoted to education at the OECD, deplores the fact that education has today “become a very conservative force”, which manifests itself, in particular, according to him, through “the resistance around of technology”.
He thus responds, more than 60 years later, to Hannah Arendt, who considered, in a famous article, that this educational conservatism was not only desirable, but necessary. If the famous philosopher defended the idea that education should be turned towards the past, it was not however out of conservatism, in the political sense of the term. Quite the contrary. She simply took for granted that the individuals of each new generation must understand the world into which they burst and which is bequeathed to them by previous generations. It is on this condition, and on this condition alone, that they can appropriate this world, make it their own, and that they are thus able to preserve it, of course, but also and above all to renovate it.
Such is the very principle of this humanist education, which makes us heirs. This is the meaning of Bernard de Chartres’ famous metaphor, which shows contemporaries seeing further than their ancestors because they are perched on the shoulders of these giants who represent their predecessors in the history of humanity.
From this humanist educational ideal, which today is attacked from all sides, stems the idea that being educated is not only about acquiring a few usable skills, but also about acquiring knowledge, a culture which is in no way “prefabricated” (they are constantly being renewed) and which form the basis of an understanding of the world in which we live.
It is an illusion to believe that, without this acquired knowledge, without this access to the past, it is possible to learn to think or to become creative. Thought which believes itself to be absolutely original, which claims to emanate spontaneously from a virgin mind, most often does nothing but stammer and rehash banal ideas of which it knows nothing. The same goes for an acculturated creativity, which generally only expresses a sentimentalism also devoid of any originality or else endlessly replays the gestures of a meaningless transgression or provocation, since they do not oppose anything.
The educational model promoted by Mr. Schleicher, in particular through the PISA tests, and with it the OECD, an international organization that is dedicated to — need we remember? — to the promotion of economic liberalism, wraps itself in bombastic ideals, claims to promote an education which “must look to the future” in order to teach young people “to think, to be creative”, under the rule of teachers “always more human[s] and inspiring[s] and thus give them, these young people, “the means to explore new territories”.
But make no mistake about it. Behind this purely rhetorical youthism and progressivism, the type of education praised by Andrea Schleicher is strictly oriented towards the training of the workforce, and where we would no longer be encumbered with these old things that are the education of citizens responsible for or the transmission of cultural heritage. It is not at all an ideal of liberation.
He reveals it himself by insisting heavily on the idea of adaptation. He wishes, he tells us, “a radical transformation of the school to adapt it to the world in great mutation”. We “have to constantly reinvent ourselves and adapt”, he adds, among other things to “the great digitization underway now”.
To adapt, constrained and forced, to a march of the world over which one no longer has the slightest hold, to struggle and run out of steam to follow these “transformations[s] radical[s] and other “mutations[s] » perpetual that one did not wish, it is not to be free. It is rather to abdicate one’s condition as a man and definitively accept “the alienation of the world” (Arendt), that is to say, to recognize once and for all that this world is not ours, that it is not ours. is not really human, but that it is designed, organized, now managed by faceless technological processes to which it has been abandoned.
This education promoted by Andreas Schleicher and the OECD, which puts forward the idea of ”preparing young people for their own future” and “not for our past”, in reality delivers them, bound hand and foot, to powers techno-financiers who no longer consider them as passive consumers and a malleable labor force endowed with a few “skills” supposed to guarantee their “employability” forever.
By depriving them of access to culture, history (including that of the sciences), philosophy and the works of the past, it also prevents them from any critical retreat from this reality which is imposed on them.
The real conservatives are therefore not those who teach these young people the philosophy of Plato or Kant, who make them read Sophocles, Shakespeare or Hugo, who explain to them Athenian democracy, feudalism or the origins of parliamentarism, who talk to them about Newton or Darwin; the real conservatives are those who, like Andreas Schleicher, want to confine these young people to their present and impose on them a future which, like a fatality, will be built without them.