Paul Valéry’s lesson on faculty | EUROtoday
Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
Dire of a textual content that “it is strikingly modern”, there’s something standard about it, little question. But upon studying Paul Valéry’s speech on the varsity’s mission delivered in 1935, it turns into tough to withstand this remark. Brought from oblivion by L’Éclaireur* editions, this textual content affords a philosophical and poetic meditation on the varsity’s mission.
“Alas, the future has never been so difficult to imagine,” he declared in entrance of the scholars and academics gathered for the event. Delivered in 1935 to the schoolchildren of his former faculty in Sète, the speech of the member of the French Academy expresses his concern in regards to the main metamorphoses of a contemporary society formed by technical progress. He observes: “The world has become, in a few years, entirely unrecognizable in the eyes of those who have lived long enough to have seen it very differently. Think of all the new facts – prodigiously new – which have come to light since the beginning of the last century. »
The “portrait of modernity” by Paul Valéry
When studying the textual content, the reader is perhaps tempted to shrug their shoulders: one other thinker who finds that “everything is going too fast”, like all thinkers of all time, which might encourage us to place into perspective related speeches made immediately. Except that Paul Valéry is on no account a reactionary: he doesn’t deplore in precept, he tries to explain a actuality – that of technical progress which accelerates all the things to an unprecedented velocity.
ALSO READ The rediscovered masterpiece of Paul Valéry“It is a portrait of modernity”, within the phrases of Pierre-Henri Tavoillot, creator of the afterword. “It is 1935, Hitler has been in power for two years, tensions in Europe are rising and technology is speeding up the world: transport, radio, experiments on matter with the work of Einstein… We are beginning to master energy and we can clearly see that this technique is beginning to devour the traditional, rather agrarian, society which prevailed in Europe”, underlines Frédéric Monlouis-Félicité, founding father of the publishing home which republishes this textual content.
“To see is to foresee,” mentioned Paul Valéry, “so that we cannot help but foresee.” However, on this interval between the 2 wars and of technical enlargement, he felt that the long run was changing into nearly indecipherable. Today, whereas the ecological disaster plunges a complete era into fog and the tech giants compete to impose their utopias of augmented people and synthetic superintelligence, the phrases of Paul Valéry resonate greater than ever.
“The current malaise therefore seems to me to be a crisis of the mind”
“He (the man, Editor’s note) was almost unable to rebuild anything in the spiritual and social order. The modern world, which has prodigiously modified our material life, has not been able to create laws, morals, politics, or an economy, which were in harmony with these immense changes, its conquests of power and precision,” he notes, earlier than concluding: “The current malaise therefore seems to me to be a crisis of the spirit. »
It is precisely to combat this crisis of the mind that school must play its role. The challenge is Herculean, because, he tells the boys seated before him, “it’s about making you men ready to face what has never been.”
However, Paul Valéry does not dream of himself as Minister of Education proposing yet another reform. The role he assigns to school is to train minds, not just to accumulate knowledge. It was then that he uttered this now famous formula: “It is not so much the quantity of knowledge that matters, but the part you give to it in yourself. Your business and your interest is to verify all this intellectual material. A little knowledge and a lot of spirit, a lot of mental activity, that’s the essential thing. »
Do not wait to act under the pressure of dangers
And it is a scholar, an academician, who reminds us of this. There is therefore no question of renouncing the transmission of knowledge. “For him, school must give future adults the means to be able, in a world whose future we do not know, to react – to be flexible, we would say today –, in any case to have a sufficiently well-trained mind to be able to adapt to almost all situations, which are by nature unpredictable,” explains Frédéric Monlouis-Félicité.
In the age of AI, once we know that forty years in the past the lifespan of a technical talent was thirty-two years and that in 2021 it was solely two years (in accordance with the OECD), it turns into pressing that college be the place the place working minds are skilled. Ninety years in the past, Paul Valéry already formulated this want: “I’d solely like us to implement them (assets, Editor’s observe) extra constantly, and never solely underneath the strain of risks. »
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
* “Every thought has its home base”, by Paul Valéry, adopted by an afterword by Pierre-Henri Tavoillot, ed. The Pathfinder, €9.90.
https://www.lepoint.fr/eureka/beaucoup-d-esprit-peu-de-savoir-la-lecon-de-paul-valery-sur-l-ecole-09-12-2025-2605044_4706.php