There was the COVID lottery to encourage the population to be vaccinated, then generous bonuses for people to agree to work as beneficiary attendants in CHSLDs. And now, with billions of dollars, the government has just announced a huge program made up of 85 measures to counter the labor shortage in Quebec.
Among these measures, the one that particularly catches my attention concerns this program which will grant scholarships to people who agree to study in fields targeted by the government. Thus, with a budget of 1.7 billion and in addition to the existing loans and bursaries program, up to $ 9,000 or $ 20,000 per year, depending on whether they are in college or university, can be granted to those who are already studying or will choose to study in professions considered essential for the economic development of Quebec.
Faintness
While understanding the objectives of this program, I still feel uneasy about this approach. We already knew that the Legault government ardently wanted CEGEPs and universities to be more connected to the job market, more attentive to the needs of employers and large businesses, but I never imagined that it would intervene. directly and in such a mercantile manner to influence thousands of young people in their choice of career, while diverting, to a certain point, the respective missions of these higher education institutions.
Especially since nothing can assure us that the gigantic sums devoted to this program will end up giving the expected results. When a journalist asked the Prime Minister if this scholarship program had been put in place following a rigorous analysis of its effectiveness, Mr. Legault proposed as arguments that it was necessary to be creative and that it was “common sense. “!
In science and philosophy, if there is one thing we learn to be wary of, it is this “common sense”. It is for having trusted him too naively that human beings have believed hard as iron for thousands of years that the sun revolved around the earth and that it was motionless …
To be fed at the Prytaneum
This pragmatic vision of education which has this bad habit of “reacting” according to the problems encountered here and now and of betting everything for everything with big bucks on what is considered useful and profitable for the community. society saddens me. In fact, this utilitarian and accounting discourse, which thinks of society in terms of jobs fees that can be created and grants distributed to achieve this, brings me back to this famous passage from Plato’s Apology for Socrates.
In 399 BC. AD, after a trial which has all the appearances of political revenge, Socrates is declared guilty “of corrupting the youth, of denying the gods of the City and of introducing new deities”. But, as was the custom at the time, the court of Helie allows whoever is found guilty to offer a reasonable sentence for the wrongs he has caused. Convinced that he devoted his life to making Athenian citizens concern themselves more with justice and the good of the City rather than with their own interests and material gains, Socrates has the nerve to propose to his judges that they grant him a reward for services rendered, that is, more specifically, to be fed at the Prytanee, where a category of magistrates was maintained at the expense of the City and where citizens who had distinguished themselves could take their meals. As we know, Socrates’ various proposals were not accepted by his judges and the philosopher was finally condemned to drink hemlock.
Repair the world
At a time when fake news, hate speech and conspiracy theories invade public space, where freedom of thought is undermined by a right-thinking decreeing what is true and well based on what is obviously felt subjective, our society would benefit, more than ever, in also valuing thinkers of the caliber of Socrates, intellectuals who, using rigorous methods, try to better understand human nature and also the challenges, other than economic ones, to which our society is facing.
Because the world in which we survive, much more than being still and always developed by an economy and toxic technologies which destroy our environment, especially badly needs to be thought out to then be repaired.
“Each generation, no doubt, believes it is doomed to remake the world. Mine knows she won’t do it again. But his task is perhaps greater. It consists in preventing the world from falling apart, ”said Albert Camus in 1957 during his speech to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is no doubt that this titanic task can only be based on the creation of paying jobs, as the Premier of Quebec seems to think.
As for Socrates, in the same way that he refused to stop philosophizing in order to save his life, one can imagine that he would not have been more tempted by a generous scholarship to learn a trade of which he hadn’t even dreamed …