11. From connerie to human silliness
Here is a subject which seems to me to be completely that of current affairs, in France at least, initially because we are in full run up to returning to school and academia, and, in addition, because we assist the collapse of the totality of our education system (from the nursery school to the university). Born, as you know it with Jules Ferry, it is, today, stiff as a corpse.
I do not believe, therefore, it is useless of me to propose, today, the autopsy, as I, ten years ago, proposed the autopsy of the Republic. As you see, all holds together! Well, State education is finished. But as one does not yet want to completely recognize it, one multiplies the alibis (see the trade unions): “Lack of jobs!”, “lack of funds!”, “lack of teachers!”, etc But these alibis no longer mislead anybody. It acts, like roughly repairing an old building, quite simply because our State education is completely unsuited to our time.
I speak of the French education system, of course, because it is that which I know best (from nursery class to the preparation for teacher recruitment competitions). What I say to you relates much less to other countries like the United Kingdom, where I had the honour to teach a while (in the “London School of Economics”), a country who, thanks to Oxford and Cambridge, harvests, as everyone knows, Nobel Prizes. But how many do we have, in France, of those such as Gilles Degenne, i.e. people who, like him, were able to avoid French scholarity?
However, we all suffer in the Occident of a formidable pervasiveness of the logos, a pervasiveness which is completely unjustified. If we have to “make the man”, why privilege the verbal abstraction so much, with detriment to the technical abstraction, the social abstraction and the ethical abstraction? Because of a tradition which comes down to us from far: the Greek philosophers, already, had privileged the logos. Christianity also, although Christianity comes from the Semites. The Jews, by the fact that they were spread throughout the Mediterranean world, saw evolving their design of what they call Dabhar, i.e. “effective Word”, “useful Word”. This Word did not have anything of this basic intellectualism of the logos Greek. Nevertheless the Judeo-Christian thought, passing through the Diaspora in the Greek world, enjoined the semantic perspective of the logos: “At the beginning was the Verb (Logos)”, begins John the apostle addressing … the Greeks, of course! It was an excellent strategy to attract the new customers who were hanging around. In other words, whether Hellenistic or Christian, both were accessories in favouring the logos, from where the importance taken by that which says, that which holds the strength of the words, those who know (the theologian and the teacher, traditionally, here).
You see, under these conditions, that I cannot, I was going to say even though I have, not speak to you about what is called intellectual training, and I will say, on this subject that we have passed, for one half-century, from “connerie” (word found in the ninth edition of the dictionary of the French Academy), to pure and simple silliness. I will distinguish these two concepts carefully: I employ the word of connerie to indicate the cultural pathology which is the doing of the methodless teachers. The word silliness is useful, to indicate ignorance. The connerie is very different: it is not ignorance; it is a failed culture, resulting from unhappy handling, not genetic, but didactic.
I am astonished that no ethics committee has yet considered handling this case, which appears to me, personally, even more sinister, in the results, than the first. Why, at the very least, schooling as didactic manipulation never comes to mind as an idea to our various State education ministers nor to that of opinion? It is even more astonishing as one no longer deprives oneself, for a while now, from criticising, not without reason, doctors, psychotherapists or even psychoanalysts, noting that the care that they bring to the various diseases with which they deal often makes things worse instead of better - when they simply provoke and cause the emergence in the patient of new diseases known as “iatrogenic”, because they are the result of the therapy. As cultural pathology could not be, it seems to me, unaware of either these frightening didactic disorders that we hide within ourselves, and which would offer, to the researchers a field of truly immense study! It is precisely, in the field of this vast domain that I wish to introduce you to this particular form of connerie that one calls intellectual conformism.
This conformism is that which is incarnate in the “good pupils” left in the few traditional Colleges which survive, i.e., beings condemned to an intellectual immaturity for life. One judges them of much less than actually exists in their connection, because of the operation of our educational establishment (to the full extent, up to the secondary and the superior), a kind of complicity if not didactic encouragement. In other words, the school is accessory to these cases by the privilege that it grants to them by maintaining them and by preceding them, while mocking them for what will occur to them afterwards, of their future for which it is supposed to prepare. Why? Quite simply because, most of the time, the school is condemned to determine statistically, in terms of “levels”, “delay” and “advance”, simple rhythms of training, and not of capacity of acquisition. In the best of the cases the pupil who coincides with the statistical model that is imposed on him is automatically judged “good”, whereas one cannot know, in the long term, if he is trained, in other words if he is able to exceed the model that one forces on him to give himself one of them, i.e. one never can, from the scholastic point of view distinguish conformism from the training, on the basis of crossing, or not, a limit confused with the school ideal of ego. Insofar as this limit becomes the ideal, those who reach it are supposed to be the best: but are they able to exceed it? And who, in the institution, can judge their capacity of going beyond? Not very many, so that it is conceived extremely well that there is a considerable number of those taught (schoolboys, high-school pupils and students) who succeed in life, whereas they were dunces at school, and that there are the “outstanding commendation awards” who remain “dry fruits” all their lives, generally, “Professors”!
It is that our teaching at the roots always was, and still remains, in some establishments known as “excellent”, auto-recruiting, i.e. this teaching, baptized “general” is actually, in an obscure way, a true professional teaching, but a very particular vocational training in that it prepares a student for only one profession: that of teacher! In connection with their pupils, the teacher of history wonders: “Will this one make a good history teacher?”, the English teacher: “Will that one make to a good English teacher?”, etc You see the problem of our State education is not at all to “professionalise” teaching, like some would wish it that seek to create successors with prolific “outstanding commendation awards” who will play teacher until the end of their life! And it is precisely because the school can make only Professors which it knows, of foundation, to prepare with no trade. The physics taught in our classes is used precisely for nothing by the physicist (ask the career physicists). A teacher of physics is not a physicist: one should realise that! In the same way, a French teacher is not a writer, etc Even better: the best physics teachers are poor physicists, best French Professors, poor writers, etc… Inversely a great physicist often makes a poor professor of physics and a great writer, a poor French teacher. To push idiocy to this level is very serious!
But there is more serious still: I want to speak about the cramming of knowledge. This cramming is what one calls scholarship. When I did my studies, even in the secondary school, we were force fed us with knowledge, if one didn’t become a Peak of Mirandole, one finished in the psychiatric hospital.
How did this passage from connerie to human silliness take place here? Thanks to the advent of pseudo “education sciences” inspired by the “cognitive psychology” of Piaget. However, what should be challenged with the utmost vigour is the idea that there are “levels” in training. Actually all alleged “training theories” at the elementary school pass by the denunciation of the ideology subjacent with the concepts (philosophic-biologists) of “growth” and “progress”. You understand, under these conditions, the nonsense of alleged “master’s training” (at school) which consists of stuffing the cranium of the training teachers with Piaget. Piaget, indeed, did not understand anything because he came from an evolutionary perspective. Therefore, according to him, reason can be developed! It should be stated that reason either is or is not: it does not develop. All that is known, today, contradicts this fraudster who straightforwardly misled everyone: his writings should simply be thrown in the dustbin, quite simply because it locates degrees and successive moments of appearance for the rational methods in the history of the individual, and, as we know, in the history of humanity, which makes of him a kind of latter-day Auguste Comte! (remember the famous “law of the three states”, mythical, metaphysical and scientific).
In other words, for Piaget, the reason is the term of an evolution, and not a specifically human principle of existence; it is at the basis, in his eyes what Aristotle called “the pipedream”, the highest achieved accomplishment of the being, i.e. the final finished moment of the child and humanity. What Piaget never understood, is that the child is a perfectly rational being on the logical, technical and ethical levels. As he did not dissociate these rational methods, the child, according to him, reaches the full development of reason only at the moment when it is adult, when it resembles us, i.e. as from the moment when it assumes the language, style and codes and thereby the totality of the culture. But it is not in that that the child discovers logic, techniques and ethics. This is what Piaget missed. At the same time, as an intellectual never breaks down, how could he explain this? He said: “The child has a rationality somewhat different from ours, but not completely all the same, etc”. Finally, he goes from there to speak about the child as Levy-Bruhl speaks about “primitive societies” or “pre-logical mentality”.
The child, therefore, takes part fully in rationality, except on his appropriation, and, at the age where it reaches this appropriation, it reaches, at the same time, the capacity to capitalize, i.e. to benefit from the training which it receives. The apprenticeship, on the contrary, is purely memory stockage. Let us say that between the training and acquisition, (or between the memory stockage and the benefits) there is no (here is the error of Piaget) continuity. Such is the inanity of a “thinker” who should be absolutely challenged, silliness which however is still used to teach in elementary schools, without speaking, of course about the Academic Institutes of Masters Training, of such a sorry reputation (I speak with full knowledge of the facts, since one of them – the I.U.F.M. of the Academy of Creteil, not to name it -, requested my services to train their future teachers: I am sure that they have not yet recovered!). In the 21st century, Comtism is still at the base of the teaching dispensed at the schools! Difficult to believe!
It is not surprising, under these conditions, that our pupils “do not know anything” at the entry into sixth level? But as they have been impregnated with nothing in the elementary school, they can “know” nothing. So, one sees baffled parents saying: “I don’t understand: in the primary school, my child did very well”, while the teachers, on their side, say: “It is a shame the professors, following us, do not want to use our methods” (whereas the method, it would serve as nothing more than a constraint!), and, finally, the professors of the secondary school are baffled: “They do not know French, they cannot count, etc”. Obviously, as there is no fruitful ground, or, at least it remained fallow (which is the definition of silliness), how can they be trained?
Finally there are all those, parents and Masters, who believe that it is necessary “to be at the level of the children”, in a true meaning, animalise. That means that as one appears to absorb one therefore presumes the understanding. But if it is really absorption that happens, the child does not need to understand. You may refuse to let them listen to a Bach cantata under pretext that the child cannot “understand”. But neither can you perpetually sing the child nursery songs thus depriving it of an initiation to music. It is normal that the child absorbs something that it “does not understand”, the understanding will come later.
In short, do you believe that we have really “progressed”? No! And the cause: no more yesterday than today do we not respect the specificity of these two phases – impregnation and communication (institution and training, apprenticeship and acquisition, accumulation and profit) which must correspond to two completely different approaches. For this reason the school does not do its work. In this respect, when the multiple reforms of State education are seen, one notes that there is a phenomenon which is never studied: the resignation of the teachers. Maybe those of the past were not worth much, one may say, but the current teachers are not worth anything at all because they went from state intervention to non intervention. It is by no means progress to pass from the idea that the newborn will never be an adult (as in the past), to that where the child is adult at the beginning (like today). In addition there is a fantastic contradiction between, on one side, the attitude which postulates the communication in the child (at the nursery school) and, on another side, the attitude which tends to block this communication when it is there (in the secondary and the superior schools).
Having said that, the only true rupture in our system, is between the primary education and… all that follows (secondary and higher). Here is the formidable difference between the training and acquisition. As for this rupture, everyone tries to mend it: teachers wanted to train the pupils of sixth year, then fifth, etc: they were the famous P.E.G.C. (“Professors of Mainstream College Education”) which were found to have de-scolarised the children… that they themselves (in theory) had educated at the school. It is incredible! Result, the nursery school was prolonged well beyond what was acceptable (obviously, since these P.E.G.C. had not received any teacher training). In other words one has a questionable border between the primary education and the secondary, which testifies to the fact that our teachers, baptized “school teachers” resigned completely, while renouncing their mission which was to teach the children.
Most astonishingly – and it is by these words that I will conclude – this opposition of institution and formation is the oldest thing in the world. In Rome, there was a very clearly marked distinction between childhood and youth. Childhood was generally entrusted to the woman: the child remained with the women until their initiation. The youth, on the contrary, after childhood, was granted entry into community life, in the company of men who had as a function the training of the young person. After initiation, indeed, the young adult did not immediately enter society, they were taught about being a citizen whereas it already had all the rights of one: they renounced the exertion of their full rights to be able to be trained in the company of the men (much more rigorous than the training with the women). In our modern societies, insofar as institution and training are professionalised, what have we obtained? The same thing, namely the primary education on one side (corresponding to childhood) and, on the other side, the secondary and the superior (corresponding to the youth), the certificate of primary studies or the examination of entry in sixth year serving as a true rite of initiation, so that, the two, namely the schoolboy on one side, the high-school pupil and the student of the other, corresponded, until the last war, to two career bodies quite distinct, which have nothing to compare one with the other: the body of the teachers and the body of the professors.
But, since Pétain, the two careers that have nothing to do with each other have been telescoped together, by treating them on a hierarchical basis. However, as soon as they are treated on a hierarchical basis, automatically a rivalry ensues, so that the teachers, insofar as it was said to them that the professors were “higher” than them (which is not true, it is another career, another vocation) they then aspired to become Professors. And then, as higher education refused to accommodate them, they arranged their own higher education: training institutes of the Masters (I.U.F.M.), about which I have already spoken. So that one arrived from there, in the name of only one career, one profession which goes from the kindergarten until higher education, to maintain a denatured institution alive, for the largest prejudice of the schoolchildren, but also the college pupils and students.
You see that while passing from connerie to silliness, we actually went, from Charybde to Scylla!