[by Xavier-Laurent Salvador]
May this article contribute to the intellectual rearmament of parents whose offspring, sometimes embarked in spite of themselves in the quicksands of studies in literature, history, geography or sociology, find themselves confronted with the deconstruction of knowledge implemented by unconscious people who – already incapable of training them in the fundamentals of language and history – also claim to make them soldiers of a nobler cause: the redemption of the Western world. Never will the generational divide have been so exacerbated by a pseudo-deconstructivist pedagogy that designates its enemy: the white thought of parents; to its soldiers: our children. Yet it is indeed them, and our future, that are in question here. But to understand it, we must still understand the essential relationship that exists between the training of young people on the benches of the university, and democracy. The nature of the person in discourse is constructed between pathos, which characterizes what he believes in and which is of the register of feeling, affect and passion on the one hand; and on the other, ethos which characterizes the rational construction of his person. Controversy is distinguished from dispute because controversy brings into play rational systems of thought while dispute sees systems of belief clash. One can be wrong and understand that one was wrong in science: this calls into question one's own ethos; but not one's person. It is always possible to rebuild oneself from a fair demonstration of the truth which advances the two opposing camps. Einstein would admit that a single experiment called into question his theory: if this had been the case, he would have come out more informed about the defects of his system...
On the other hand, when pathos is reached: it is the whole moral person that is upset.
Now imagine that every scientist, instead of engaging his intelligence and his system in scientific demonstration, engages not what he believes he knows, but what he is. What he really is. He would then shift the stakes from what he thinks to what he is convinced of and which governs his existence. Imagine that he is wrong. It is no longer his thought that collapses, but his being. This sums up the problem of gender and race theories that decenter the stakes of the pseudo-scientific controversy (does mental race exist? Is mental gender an objective fact?) to the dispute: when we confront a young student who believes in the "awakening" of consciences, he feels attacked not on a rational construction, but in his intimate conviction, not to say in his faith. This is why, very often, the clashes around these questions of gender and race seem to be based on a rhetoric of faith, or even of sect: they bring into play not the ethics of the individual, but his personal construction and that on which his very person is based.
In recent academic work, young doctoral students highlight their role in "awareness-raising": for them, research no longer consists of reporting with more or less asceticism on an observable, but of "making aware" the people they are questioning of the underlying mechanisms of which they would be victims without knowing it: racism, gender contempt, heteropatriarchy. By immediately renouncing the axiological neutrality so dear to Max Weber, these "researchers" in fact free themselves from the deontological rules that found the ethics of the researcher. In this sense, they accentuate the blurring of reason and feeling: which is the very fact of sectarian and dangerous discourses.
The consequence of their implantation in the university episteme is the upheaval of the cartography of knowledge opening the door to the penetration of irrationality in the field of knowledge, and its teaching. So: why is magic not taught in schools? Because if the University recognizes magic as teknê, as a practice: it rejects it as an episteme. The University keeps the boundary between science and magic watertight… But if we switch to a universe based on the quest for feeling – it is the entire cartography of knowledge that will be abolished.
But beware: scientific jargon is a rhetorical tool of extreme force that connotes seriousness. Decolonialism starts from a simple aphorism: any statement "you are" comes from a cultural reading grid linked to an "I" that mirrors the opinion of this culture. Either the "I" adheres to it, or on the contrary it submits to it. This mechanism is - according to the followers - a "colonialism" of the mind that can be summarized as follows:
To colonize is bad; or to educate: it is to colonize minds; therefore to educate is bad. This colonialism exists according to them at all levels of a society: at the micro-local level where the balance of power is supported by a condescending vision of the colonizer for the colonized; at the democratic level where the colonizer imposes his political grid; at the school level, where the colonizer imposes his vision of history; at the global level, where the colonizer imposes his vision of the economy. The colonizer, in this case, carries the seeds of a dominant culture at all levels: he is Western and therefore subject to the American Empire, he is capitalist, he is heterosexual: in a word – he is white. But be careful: not “white” as you think – that’s why we say it more often in English. He is white, it means that he thinks like a Westerner. And therefore non-white are all those who claim another observatory on their own identity than that imposed by white society. It is understood that as soon as a "white" - understood in this sense - assigns an identity to another, he is in colonialism: all that remains for the "whites" is to remain silent to allow the assumed non-whiteness of minority groups to be expressed.
All this deconstruction – sorry: this deconstructivism – would be inconsequential if such an affirmation did not stem from the urgent and claimed need to deconstruct all the “privileges” of white culture where it is expressed in society: the Republic and all its institutions, starting with schools. Thus, one researcher is interested in “examining the processes of racialization as a power relationship at work in the French educational world, and the way in which they are articulated with social relationships of gender and class, in particular”. From this observation, which could be discussed, comes the idea that spiritual colonialism pollutes minds, and that minds must therefore be depolluted in all scientific “observatories”: science is colonial, language is colonial, literature is colonial, culture is colonial.
But what matters at university is not what I am but what I know.
Research disciplines (mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.) are the subject of a global description that students must learn to master in degrees before contributing their own stone to the building. This tiering of the discipline corresponds to something that everyone knows: the diploma. The diploma is the certification by teacher-researchers that the student's profile corresponds to a certain level of elevation in knowledge based on common tests that allow the levels of students to be compared with each other, of course, but above all: to gauge them in relation to the standard meter of the quantity of knowledge acquired. In other words, the distribution of diplomas in disciplines in the University is based on a kind of knowledge mapping that guides Research and innovation on the one hand and structures the training of studies on the other by imposing in particular a disciplinary framework. These research areas are present within the Universities in components themselves linked to Training and Research and are represented at the national level by the National Council of Universities which is itself divided into sections, into academies by discipline where elected or appointed representatives sit. And the entire chain of secondary education is therefore linked to this knowledge mapping and its structure.
The entire field of knowledge within the CNRS is divided into disciplines. But be careful, this division, set by ministerial decree, is regularly adapted to the evolution of science and disciplinary fields by a reorganization of the number of sections, and their titles. This organization, apparently very dense, sets in particular the expectations of the first diploma marking entry into higher education: the baccalaureate, whose tests already have a disciplinary coloring. The content of the baccalaureate tests is in some way linked to the organization of Research, and the entire chain of secondary education is therefore linked to this mapping of knowledge and its structure. Thus, the disciplines set a threshold of knowledge per diploma and the State arbitrates that the level of training of a teacher in each of the disciplines is played out to a certain degree by the elevation of the student in his field. The tests and their content are the subject of a consensus. This explains how the irruption of studies in the field of human sciences weighs heavily in the short term on the organization of the school. Indeed, if the self-proclaimed "studies" were thus constituted, it is above all because they are transversal to the disciplines: one can be in porn studies and be a teacher of Modern Literature or American civilization. This deliberately maintained vagueness leads teacher-researchers to be activists of their studies on one side and on the other, to intervene as a literature teacher at different levels of diplomas, up to that of Masters of teaching. And this is why we see the flourishing of course titles that no longer have anything to do with Literature. Thus, in certain universities in Bachelor's degree, we see the emergence of fields whose goal is, the brochure explains to us: "to draw practical lessons from the theoretical contributions of gender, racial and colonial studies whose work has shown the domination of the epistemological and artistic field by heterosexual white men"; or another course devoted to medieval literature in the same field seeks through the reading of Christine de Pizan to "question the notion of gender (sic)".
From the moment these fields become surreptitiously institutionalized by the activism of teachers, it is not impossible, as Les Échos does in an article from May 2019, to affirm that there are many professional opportunities for Masters in gender:
"After the adoption by international institutions of this new definition, the perspective gender and the issue of gender equality have entered the “bureaucratic engineering” of a large number of actors (international organizations, national bodies in charge of public policy, NGOs, businesses).”
https://start.lesechos.fr/apprendre/universites-ecoles/masters-en-gender-studies-la-ruee-des-etudiants-tres-diplomes-1175508
Little by little, the mapping of areas of expertise is being disrupted by this irruption of studies to the forefront. And this is how we are gradually witnessing the assumed claim of young certified teachers for inclusive or decolonial teaching in secondary school classes, while it is no longer a question of positive knowledge from an identifiable discipline, but of a moralizing discourse. We are even noting a considerable weakening of formal skills in the disciplinary field that young graduates are supposed to be relevant to. It is no surprise that we now find teachers making conjugation mistakes but who practice inclusive writing. Tomorrow's society is being built in today's tutorial classes and lecture halls... There is a danger that the University, and then the school, will shift into a form of "soft power" which, under the false pretext of taking care of individuals, will end up institutionalizing the worst irrational excesses and, ultimately, reintroducing magic into the mapping of disciplines. Now, whoever says "magic" of nature speaking implies "superior magicians" capable of hearing its "true" universal discourse. It is therefore not insignificant to see masters in "plant linguistics" or "gender deconstruction" introduced in Parisian universities: this is an indication of the reestablishment of magical thinking in the mapping of knowledge.
We must therefore fight against the spread of this scourge, and do so in a frank and calm manner. It is the ambition of our work to present some calm reflections on the excesses of which we are privileged and dismayed witnesses.
