The high school students worked on Wednesday June 15 on the dreaded baccalaureate philosophy test. Candidates in the general stream had to choose between a subject on art, “Do artistic practices transform the world?”, another on the state, “Is it up to the state to decide what is right?” and a text by Antoine-Augustin Cournot on psychology. “These are subjects that really called on the candidates to think for themselves”believes Francis Métivier, professor of philosophy at the Lycée Duplessis-Mornay in Saumur and at the University of Tours, on franceinfo.
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The author of Pascal at the beach, sincerity in a deckchair qualifies these topics “difficult” but says he is calm for the candidates “provided you have trained by yourself”. According to him, the art of a good copy is a copy that “rethink a new subject and which, then, calls on knowledge seen in class”.
franceinfo: What did you think of these topics?
Francis Metivier: These are topics that really called on the candidates to think for themselves. For the subject, “do artistic practices transform the world?”, it was not a question of resuming the lesson given in class on art. This is a question that is quite unexpected, in particular by the concept of artistic practices. Usually, in philosophy, we wonder about beauty, about works of art, but here, we wonder about artistic practice. So, you still had to have knowledge about the way artists work and, above all, about the effect of artistic work on the world, about its ability to change it, to make it better. Same for the second topic. “Is it up to the state to decide what is right?”. It was not a question of simply resuming his course on justice or on the State, but of linking two notions to the program through a question which is quite classic, but quite difficult and quite technical in its formulation.
Cournot’s text was also a difficult text?
Yes, it was also a difficult text because it is a text which criticizes psychology whereas psychology is not a concept in the program. Some were able to approach it, but not everyone.
“It was really necessary, not to try to stick a ready-made methodology of text explanation, but to really understand the text in all its specificity.”
Francis Métivier, professor of philosophyat franceinfo
The problem with Cournot is that psychology does not meet the usual criteria of what is for him a real science.
Did some subjects still surprise you?
The subjects are always surprising. Even we are surprised, because if the subjects are not surprising, it means that the subjects are course questions. However, the subjects are not course questions. So, we can rely on it, but it is not a question of reciting it or taking it up as it is. It’s about rethinking a new subject and then using knowledge seen in class. The course is absolutely essential to provide material and to help demonstrate the assertions.
Philosophy, ultimately, what is it? Is it asking questions without necessarily having the answers?
It is a questioning. It is the organized, methodical set of questions for which there are answers, but answers which are always to be discussed, which can be called into question. This is why we ask candidates to make a dialectical plan that addresses different orientations of the subject, not to confine themselves to a single answer that would be dogmatic.
Are you confident about your students?
Instead. The work of the philosophy teacher is indeed to transmit knowledge, but also a bit like a sports coach, to ensure that students train precisely to think for themselves. So I think students are trained enough to think for themselves on surprising topics to be able to get by, provided they have also trained for themselves.