There Public school week begins next Monday and will continue until October 6. I wanted to talk about it through a philosopher I admire: Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794).
Condorcet was primarily a mathematician, but his intellectual interests were so great that his friends called him the Condor, after the bird with the largest wing span. He will fight in particular against slavery, against the discrimination suffered by black people and for women’s rights.
We owe to the mathematician who looked into the question of voting a famous paradox which led to Arrow’s famous theorem. You will enjoy yourself…
But let’s leave it at that.
Condorcet, still alive in 1789, was one of the rare Enlightenment philosophers to take an active part in the French Revolution. His contribution, which largely concerns education, is immense and still resonates very strongly today.
See instead, with the following examples…
Public education and its conditions
Condorcet is not talking about education, but about public instruction. Over time, many of us have understood by the word “education” what he had in mind and which is useful to remember.
For him, this public education is a duty of society towards citizens and aims to emancipate them through the transmission of knowledge, truths of fact or reason. Inequality of education, writes Condorcet, is one of the main sources of tyranny. “As long as there are men who do not obey their reason alone, who receive their opinion from a foreign reason, in vain all the chains would have been broken. The human race would remain divided into two classes, that of men who reason and that of men who believe, that of masters and that of slaves. »
It is therefore knowledge that public schools must transmit, and not political, moral and religious opinions. Here, a red light comes on. Its name is secularism. If the law of 1905 is its mother, Condorcet is its father. In 1792, he wrote this: “The principles of morality taught in schools and in institutes will be those which, based on our natural feelings and on reason, belong equally to all men. The Constitution, by recognizing the right of each individual to choose their religion, by establishing complete equality between all the inhabitants of France, does not allow the admission, in public education, of teaching which, by rejecting the children of a part of the citizens, would destroy the equality of social advantages, and would give to particular dogmas an advantage contrary to the freedom of opinions. It was therefore strictly necessary to separate the principles of any particular religion from morality, and not to admit in public education the teaching of any religious cult. »
I think we should remember this and complete what we have started in this direction.
As we know, there is currently a shortage of teachers and university enrollments are in many cases declining.
Here is a remark from Condorcet on this subject. “The public authorities must therefore above all avoid entrusting education to teaching bodies who recruit themselves. […] Whether these bodies are orders of monks, congregations of half-monks, universities, simple corporations, the danger is equal. The instruction they give will always have as its aim, not the progress of enlightenment, but the increase of their power; not to teach the truth, but to perpetuate prejudices useful to their ambition. »
How to avoid possible abuses? Condorcet has an idea. School, by definition, should only submit to the authority of truth and science. To achieve this, Condorcet imagined the creation of a National Society of Sciences and Arts “with the mission of managing educational establishments, enriching cultural heritage and disseminating discoveries”. It could work to guarantee the scientific quality of programs and even write school textbooks. In this way, it would help to ensure that public education, offered by the State, is also independent of it.
Nowadays we could call this company “Institute of Excellence in Education”… We wonder where we are with this one…
A moving end of life
Feeling his life threatened in the tumult of the Terror, Condorcet took refuge with a friend. When he fears that she too will be threatened, he leaves his home.
But first, he writes a touching letter to his daughter, finishes and secures his final work, written while he is in hiding (Sketch of a historical picture of the progress of the human mind) as well as mathematics work.
But also, he takes the time to write… a book to teach children to count easily! In these tragic hours, it is therefore also of them that he thinks.
He leaves. Quickly arrested, he was found dead in his cell on March 29, 1794, from a cause that we have not been able to identify with certainty: exhaustion, suicide, assassination?
Respectful greetings, dear Condor.