While the radio continues to report armed conflicts and natural disasters, other information also seeps into the living room. Some of that information seems once more to give evidence of the tense societal relationship between groups of people and institutions and the specific institution society has chosen to provide schooling and part of education to its children.
Sometimes tensions have to do with politicians or powerful rulers imposing their will. But sometimes it also has to do with people guided to not accept a rational or humanistic approach to science. And it is likely that parents' refusal to accept certain items inscribed on a curriculum has much to do with the lack of dialogue that results from taking inflexible positions most of the time by the central administration. Countries periodically even experience “school battles”, that battle between secular and religious rulers trying to impose their influence on other parts of the population or on the whole nation going that far war is invoked as a mean to obtain results. It takes courage to keep the dialogue going. I think of part of a speech by Jaurès in 1903 to the students graduating from high school in Albi, during the graduation ceremony: “Above all, let no one accuse us of lowering or irritating courage. Humanity is cursed if to show courage it is condemned to kill eternally. Courage today is not about keeping the dark cloud of war over the world, a terrible but dormant cloud, which we cannot always desire to break out on others. Courage is not leaving in the hands of force the solution of conflicts that reason can resolve; because courage is the exaltation of mankind and this is its abdication. Courage for all of you, courage of all hours, is to endure without flinching the trials of all kinds, physical and moral, that life lavishes. Courage is to be at the same time and whatever the profession, a practitioner and a philosopher. Courage is to understand one's own life, to clarify it, to deepen it, to establish it and to coordinate it with general life. Courage is seeking the truth and telling it; it is not to submit to the law of the triumphant lie that passes, and not to echo, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, the imbecile applause and the fanatical roar.”
Not so far away in space and thirty years away in time Célestin Freinet was forced to leave his work after a part of the local population, led by the mayor, furiously opposed his pedagogical approach, which was apparently ahead of its time and opposed to dogmatism the furious population aimed. He would even have shown a revolver in an attempt to protect his pupils.
It takes courage to refute dogmatic positions in dialogue.
Sometimes tensions have to do with politicians or powerful rulers imposing their will. But sometimes it also has to do with people guided to not accept a rational or humanistic approach to science. And it is likely that parents' refusal to accept certain items inscribed on a curriculum has much to do with the lack of dialogue that results from taking inflexible positions most of the time by the central administration. Countries periodically even experience “school battles”, that battle between secular and religious rulers trying to impose their influence on other parts of the population or on the whole nation going that far war is invoked as a mean to obtain results. It takes courage to keep the dialogue going. I think of part of a speech by Jaurès in 1903 to the students graduating from high school in Albi, during the graduation ceremony: “Above all, let no one accuse us of lowering or irritating courage. Humanity is cursed if to show courage it is condemned to kill eternally. Courage today is not about keeping the dark cloud of war over the world, a terrible but dormant cloud, which we cannot always desire to break out on others. Courage is not leaving in the hands of force the solution of conflicts that reason can resolve; because courage is the exaltation of mankind and this is its abdication. Courage for all of you, courage of all hours, is to endure without flinching the trials of all kinds, physical and moral, that life lavishes. Courage is to be at the same time and whatever the profession, a practitioner and a philosopher. Courage is to understand one's own life, to clarify it, to deepen it, to establish it and to coordinate it with general life. Courage is seeking the truth and telling it; it is not to submit to the law of the triumphant lie that passes, and not to echo, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, the imbecile applause and the fanatical roar.”
Not so far away in space and thirty years away in time Célestin Freinet was forced to leave his work after a part of the local population, led by the mayor, furiously opposed his pedagogical approach, which was apparently ahead of its time and opposed to dogmatism the furious population aimed. He would even have shown a revolver in an attempt to protect his pupils.
It takes courage to refute dogmatic positions in dialogue.