The Quebec Collegiate Student Federation (FECQ) went out a few days ago to call for a modernization of general education at CEGEP.
Particular mention was made of the French/literature and philosophy courses. The FECQ praised the English-speaking CEGEPs, where the choice of courses is more meaningful for the students, vis-à-vis the more rigid philosophy curriculum in the French-speaking colleges. As a philosophy teacher (and I will only talk about philosophy here), and knowing that I am shooting my profession a little in the foot by writing this open letter, I simply want to say this: they are right.
I remember this sentence, which a senior civil servant threw at me a few years ago in his office in Quebec City, when he was conducting consultations on the future of CEGEPs: “until when will we do the same something in philosophy classes? It was a man named Mr. Demers, who had been mandated by the government at the time to explore the possibility of changing something. I had gone to file my little memoir, in the shared hope with him that one day things would change. Because I think the most important thing at this age is that they read, discuss and write about something that interests them. Not that we still impose essential classics on them.
The age for these mandatory things is in high school. This is why I have already campaigned for Ethics and Religious Culture courses to become philosophy courses and not civic education courses. Learning the Allegory of the cave and the “I think, therefore I am” should be done at 15, not at 18. This age of majority at school (in short, that of higher education) should rhyme with two things, from the point of view of the world of ideas: what interests the student and what interests the teacher?
The Quebec of 2023 is not the still disheveled Quebec of the Quiet Revolution, we are elsewhere and compulsory college education must reflect this.
Philosophy teachers at CEGEP, in the 15 years that I have been practicing this profession, have completely changed their face. While few of them ventured into writing and research at one time, it is commonplace today and we should be happy about it. Opening up the range of choices for students would encourage this renewed dynamism among teachers.
The outcry had been immediate at the time of Mr. Demers. The defenders of a common general culture completely dominated the debate and this poor gentleman did not change anything at the CEGEPs following his consultation. It was not his mandate, he told me, he was just exploring. However, it seems clear to me that if we want to save the humanities, which seem to be in decline, we must make them sexier as early as possible in the student’s curriculum. And Socrates, for the vast majority of them, is as exciting as a strip club on the side of a highway. After CEGEP, it will be too late, since for most of them it is the last school contact they will have with everything related to thinking.
I can no longer find the arguments to defend the importance of universally studying Plato for a young adult. For a child, yes, for a teenager, certainly. But an adult should have the choice, while being compelled to think. I’ve held back for a long time what I’m about to write because it would cost future colleagues jobs if we change all that, but come on, “dare to think for yourself”, Kant whispers to me.
I sincerely believe that the number of compulsory philosophy courses at CEGEP should be reduced, or even abolished.
A choice of courses in a bank of “arts and humanities” courses seems to me by far more relevant, both for the motivation of a student who is nearing the end of his school career (technical students, without university plans, especially) and for teachers, who will be pushed to invent, create, in short, give themselves the lungs of their speculative ambitions. History of slavery, media psychology, Quebec socio-conservative, feminist philosophy, modern painting, history of American television series, languages: if a student did three or four of these instead of the current three philosophy courses, he would like more the humanities and the arts, in short reflection, which does not have to be overseen by philosophy as was the case in the Middle Ages.
Isn’t one of the goals of CEGEPs to broaden horizons? In my own department, where there are more than thirty philosophy teachers, only one course per session is granted to a lucky teacher who can create a complementary philosophy course of his own. It is in this context that I was able to do my philosophy of hip-hop for eight years. This year, I passed the torch to a colleague who teaches “the art of persuasion” and his classes are overflowing. I dream of a CEGEP where all general education teachers can invent things like this, and students benefit from the fact that their teachers are not teachers who chew over a ministerial estimate in their own way, but rather offer them the best years of their life of the spirit, like spring seeds of thought.