Every five or ten years, general college education is called into question. It is accused of giving too much space to this or not enough to that and then claiming that it is anchored to some new preoccupation of the moment. Last week, the Collegiate Student Federation (FECQ) revived a (dusty?) idea already debated in 2019: to model the French-speaking network on the model of “ humanities from Anglophone colleges, on the pretext that students would find their courses less boring if they could choose from thematic options.
This proposal, which favors the preference of individuals to the detriment of the common cultural fund, constitutes a threat to the integrity of general education thus fragmented and subject to the arbitrariness of the changing tastes of students or current events.
Caricatural and inaccurate description of general training
When you want to kill your dog, you pretend he has rabies. Anyone who wants to ax general education must first present it rhetorically as old-fashioned, “dusty”, disconnected and frozen in the 1970s. This caricatural image continues to be attached to the work of general education teachers, even if the reality is quite different.
The latter constantly update their courses, read ancient and contemporary works in the light of societal issues and debates (ecology, feminism, linguistic question, indigenous cultures, etc.), in which they participate through publications and public interventions. It is thus erroneous to claim that general education has not changed for 30 years.
The client is king ?
After portraying current practices as relics of the Middle Ages, the miracle cure is brandished: if students could choose more attractive, lighter courses that correspond to their career “interests and objectives”, they would be more successful in their careers. Training should therefore be thought out on the basis of the particular interest of the client.
End of the “obligation” to study a subject. End of intellectual gratuity, which allows many a first and perhaps last broadening of thought before its application to a profession.
At Radio-Canada, a student who dreams of becoming a politician said he enjoyed studying great figures like Desmond Tutu or Martin Luther King. The example of Doctor King is strangely chosen, since the latter was a great reader of the classics. He based his writings on Plato, Sophocles or Aeschylus, books that we should not read if they do not immediately arouse our interest, according to what the FECQ lobby claims, whose position has however the merit of clarifying the debate: should we start from the immediate (and always differentiated) interest of each or think about what the Greeks called the paideiathe formation of the mind, from another place, that of entry into a common cultural and symbolic universe?
Two conceptions, which one could call liberal or neoliberal and republican, of education confront each other here. In the latter, it is not a question of subordinating the learning to the personal interest of the client, but precisely of getting out of oneself to enter into possession of a heritage that is beyond us.
Enter a common world
Hannah Arendt pointed out, in The cultural crisis, that the education of newcomers presupposes transmitting to them the keys to understanding the common world that they inherit, deploring the growing gamification of education in the United States. Of course, young people must be able to build the future and “change the world”, but paradoxically, they will not be able to achieve this without knowing where this world comes from and what are the stories and ideas on which it was built.
The improvement of the future has as a condition the reception of a past heritage, amassed by societies and civilizations, which cannot be reduced to the immediate and short-sighted interest of the individual. Nobody would claim that it is enough, to learn physics, chemistry or sociology, to discuss only what gives pleasure; the same goes for philosophy and literature, which require knowledge whose learning cannot be reduced to amusement.
The liquidation of the past
The subjects of general education are disciplines transmitted by academics who have taken the time to deepen them and who exercise their judgment in order to weave bridges between the past and the future. However, in the name of a triumphalist presentism, we despise today both their work and the works and the past on which they are based.
The signatories of this letter believe that, on the contrary, general education must be defended against this liquidating and uprooted attitude, specific to this era without memory, where the dereliction of the privatized individual, locked up in himself and transformed into a client is only the counterpart of a world abandoned in the hands of a drifting economic system.
* The complete list of signatories is online.