The news hasn’t caused much noise, but it should worry us. September 4, The sun reported that the Quebec government “would prepare to reform the university environment by orienting young people more towards so-called higher paying or highly specialized programs”. In June, François Legault and Danielle McCann, Minister of Higher Education, would have met the rectors to discuss the possibility of “aligning education more with the needs of the market”.
The approach seems to be inspired by a Japanese precedent. In 2015, in fact, a directive emanating from the government of this country asked the presidents of the 86 public national universities to “think about directing 18-year-olds towards highly useful fields where society is in demand”, as the newspaper reported. Release September 25, 2015. The Japanese government went so far as to “make state subsidies conditional on the progress of reforms” in this direction.
For the moment, the Legault government is not going that far, but is considering the idea of offering scholarships to young people who choose the “right” programs, such as finance, engineering and artificial intelligence. We can guess the rest: the programs considered less useful, even useless, by the boeotians in power will be neglected and perhaps even threatened with disappearance. The humanities, literature and philosophy will win the day, as usual.
Criticism is eternal: these areas may excite intellectuals or dreamers, but are not of much use. At the college level, for example, literature and philosophy courses are frequently accused of hindering or delaying graduation.
In 2017, an advertisement from the Commission scolaire de Laval promoted vocational training in these terms: “No time to waste (No philosophy, no literature, no English… In short, just what you like! ) ”The Minister of Education finally had the advertisement withdrawn, but the affair gives an idea of the spirit which prevails in certain circles.
Professor of philosophy at Cégep de Saint-Laurent, Marco Jean deplores this stupidity which strikes even the leaders of our society and which feeds the disinterest of young people in the subject he teaches. “The essential problem with the criticism of the compulsory teaching of philosophy at the college level is that today it is evaluated only in terms of an overly simplified concept of utility,” he writes in The philosophy today (Nota bene, 2021, 174 pages), a strong plea for the maintenance of this subject in CEGEP.
No one, of course, disputes the need to train competent workers who are professionally useful to society, but, adds Jean, the training of “individuals capable of moral and political (and therefore philosophical) reflection” is just as necessary, if only to be able to think about the concept of utility.
Training people to support economic growth may be a good thing, but training them so that they are also able to ask themselves if this growth is healthy and beneficial to all is necessary with the same necessity to avoid the drift towards what Bernanos called a robot society.
In The Tyranny of Merit (Albin Michel, 2021), his remarkable critique of the concept of meritocracy, the American philosopher Michael J. Sandel rightly proposes, in order to reaffirm the dignity of work and of workers, not to leave the monopoly of philosophical training to teaching higher education and to introduce this subject into vocational training. “There is no reason to think that those who want to become nurses or plumbers are less adept at the art of democratic debate than aspiring managers or consultants,” he writes. Who is it useful to deprive them of this informed participation in the public discussion?
Philosophy courses at the college level, recalls Marco Jean, teach students to distinguish between the various types of discourse on reality – science, philosophy and religion -, to think about the ethical, religious and ideological pluralism of our societies, to reflect on moral issues. of technoscience and under the conditions of a just political system. To conclude that they are useless is to deny the citizen and the human in the worker.
“We cannot escape philosophy,” wrote Karl Jaspers. The only question that arises is whether it is conscious or not, good or bad, confused or clear. Anyone who rejects it thereby affirms a philosophy, without being aware of it. That of those who believe that economic growth is our salvation and that we will take care of the rest if we have the time is bad.