My dear friends,
I am not a professional teacher, more of a researcher, but then, from time to time, I do give lectures and conferences. I am now becoming increasingly convinced that changing the way we think is a fundamental issue. Inter-disciplinary exchanges are almost inexistent in our universities and, our school teaching methods, tend to break things up and split reality, thus isolating and confining subjects into a single discipline; nothing is done to link subjects together. Key problems are ignored by such fragmentation: global issues, not only core issues on humanity at all periods in time, but also fundamental problems facing humanity in our so-called era of globalisation. Remodelling the educational system is, for me, an absolute necessity. It’s not just a question of teaching children, we should also “re-educate the educators” and that’s a general problem.
My project was to prepare a manual, a manual for school-children, teachers and the general public; after all, the problem was there to be tackled...
My project was slowly taking shape when, quite unexpectedly, the French ex-Minister of Education asked me to reflect upon the knowledge content that could be found in our secondary school system.
I believed one could not dissociate knowledge found in secondary schools from its content in primary schools and/or higher education. I was however eager to take on the offer and began cautiously exploring what to propose, how to bring about knowledge-bridging. I then organised several meetings under the main theme:“Relier les connaissances” (Knowledge bridging). And, from then on, my research on “Les sept Savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du futur” (The Need of Seven Knowledges in Future Education) slowly began to take shape.
Naturally, no reform was made in the French educational system (which I didn’t expect and was hence not really disappointed) but, thanks to my book entitled "Les sept Savoirs” (Seven Knowledge Factors), first published by UNESCO, my ideas were shared and some work actually began, more especially in Latin America. Perhaps, reform will come from outside of our old continent?
With this introduction, I would like to share my ideas on the need for seven knowledge factors in future education. This is not a new break-up of reality nor a new programme pattern; its more of a re-modelling process to insert knowledge where it had been scattered. All in all, its the very notion of knowledge. We should ask ourselves a very simple question: “What is teaching all about?” It’s just a matter of teaching knowledge. But it’s never taught per se. Moreover, it’s always contaminated by some form of error or illusion. This could be a most serious problem for us all, as we know very well that errors and illusions can lead us to act dangerously, both on ourselves and onto others. Similarly, if we look at the past, we can see in it a tissue of errors and illusions. Yet, we believe we are protected form illusion and error. If we look at the Soviet Union’s past, for instance, we could say: “All these people, such nice people, who actually believed the Soviet Union had resolved the fundamental problems of humanity. What an illusion!” What a let down! Others believed in a yet another illusion: that the globalisation of the economy would solve all human problems. We are not even immune as we are still prepared to accept out-dated illusions. Besides, I am quite certain that many old illusions are here to stay.
Why is this so? Knowledge is something very important simply because the links between error, illusion and knowledge are obvious if, and only if, we accept that knowing does not mean perceiving; its not as simple as taking a picture. When I perceive you, I do not have a photo of this room on my retina, a picture in my mind. And why isn’t this room printed-out as a photo? This is because, although my eye, my retina, can see larger entities seated on the first row and smaller entities seated further back, my mind will not consider, at any time, that people seated at the back are tiny, or even dwarfs, and that people on the front rows are much bigger than they really are. In other words, a well known phenomena called “perceptive constancy” reshapes a person’s normal size. What does this mean? We can give an explanation by saying that all knowledge is a form of translation. To take on a visual sense, messages sent to our eyes, under some stimulus or photon (a term preferred by physicians), are translated and codified; they then arrive, go through our optical nerve, undergo numerous changes in the brain and are immediately transformed into perceptions.
So, we are now facing this problem. It’s all the more complicated because our brain has no inner mechanism to differentiate hallucinations from perceptions. The only way to find out is ask other people whether they experience similar hallucinations; and yet, group hallucinations exist too. Complete knowledge is a question of translation and reconstruction and, I think we can accept that even ideas per se, are translations and reconstructions. Hence, translation and receptivity can be qualified as a type of knowledge scaffolding.
Naturally, we have to very cautious and effectively learn how to control our perceptions. I will give you a personal example: I was coming back home on a street I know very well and was really surprised to read an inscription on the wall at the back-end of the street: “urinoir” (urinal). But, obviously, at that precise moment, I had a pressing need to go to the toilets; the actual inscription was “luminaire” (lighting). Hence, it’s quite obvious we all have wrong perceptions. Another example, well known to us all, are witnesses of a road accident; they will relate totally different stories because what they actually perceive is just a reconstruction. I personally believe, here again, that we should re-learn the way we look and reconsider our vision of things.
I think all this becomes even clearer when we accept that knowledge is marked by a cultural imprint inherited from our family, school, society... we inherit ideas which, for us, become absolute truths. In every society, social class and group, as with the intelligentsia, and maybe even more particularly within the intelligentsia, certain ideas are totally obvious whilst others are rejected as deviations, mad, bad or absurd.
It would be wrong to interpret rejected ideas, in a given time period, as bad. Copernicus’s heliocentric conception, adapted by Galileo, was not considered, at his time, to be negative. What may appear as some critical deviation is not always negative. More often than not, the brightest ideas spring from people who refuse dogmas and norms of a given culture.
It’s clear that a fundamental task in education is learning how to distance ourselves from our culture, analysing it whilst also accepting to be self-critical. In French culture, we have an excellent example, given by Montaigne: the free exercise of the mind brings him to cross-examine himself, which he does with great subtlety; he then discovers a sense of relativity of his own cultural values. At the time of the vicious conquest of the Americas, Montaigne did not, at any moment, dismiss pre-Columbian civilisations as a mere tissue of errors and superstitions. He believed any civilisation has its proper virtues and values. Following Isabela la Catolica’s decree, the majority of Jews in Spain had converted to Roman Catholicism. Two christianised Maranos of Jewish origin, one of them being Bartolomeo de las Casas, argued that Indians possessed a soul; this was in contradiction with the beliefs of Spanish theologists. The second Marano was Montaigne. Both men were deviationists of the western world’s official cultural creeds. Today, the ideas of both these deviationists are accepted as totally normal, even obvious.
I think we should also explain the principle of the paradigm, a difficult concept to grasp. There are several ways to determine what a paradigm is, even in simple terms. I personally attempt to define a paradigm by analysing the sense it has taken in structural linguistics; I then attempt to widen its meaning by adapting it to the realm of thought, speech and ideas.
What is a paradigm? It’s a principle controlling and governing all forms of speech, all ideas, having an impact on the way we think... because it controls our logic and determines key concepts. For example, if we consider ideas on nature and culture, we can find three possible paradigms:
1. The first reduces culture (i.e. the human being) to nature. Today, for example, certain socio-biologists will attempt to understand human behaviour by analysing our genes;
2. The second paradigm attempts to understand human beings by casting nature aside. Man becomes a spiritual being alone as if the spirit - mind, mente - was separated from the body. All current anthropological studies, at university level, dissociate entirely Man from the natural, biological and physical being;
3. A third possible paradigm demonstrates what are the links and/or differences between nature and culture. In fact, we are just animals and natural beings who, during the course of evolution, have acquired something more, something new. To be more precise, it is our spirit, consciousness, culture and language. In other words, something linking us to nature whilst, at the same time, differentiating us from it.
The same paradigm can control totally opposite concepts and different points of view. Let us take the Cartesian paradigm as an example: a principle that is still applicable in the western world consisting in separating the mind, consciousness and subject (applicable to the fields of philosophy and meta-physics and what Descartes called ego cogitens) from the world of matter and objects (applicable to science or the res extensa in Descartes words). Thus, following this principle, when meta-physicists look down on science and scientists in turn denigrate metaphysics, they are quite unable to understand each other. Each party prefers locking itself in a realm of absolute privilege.
So, we should learn which paradigm controls the way we think. In our civilisation, we are controlled by what I would call the disjunction paradigm, compelling us to continuously divide and analyse things (analysis can be very useful but it hinders our capacity to link things together) and, the reduction paradigm, an explanation for everything by applying the principle that we can solve any complexity by analysing the simple elements of its make-up. This is a key problem.
We have yet another problem concerning mistakes, errors, illusions, knowledge: not only do we possess ideas; we can also be overwhelmed by ideas, as if possessed by supernatural beings. What struck me most, when attending a candomblé ritual in Brazil, was the moment when the presence of the orixa (spirit, ghost, saint) was invited. Such entities and/or deities take possession of a person who will suddenly express his/herself with the voice of the orixa. As you know, there are many possession cults. But, even in a religion where there is no cult, a believer will obey orders given by his/her “god” (they tend to be terrifying gods) and will then try to ask for some favours, some goodwill; but gods, alas, tend to do what they want. In our world of laity, however, many ideas have been deified and we are even prepared to die for an idea because we have an extremely barbaric and unrestrained relationship with ideas. I even wrote a book on the life, customs and habitat of ideas to explain this phenomena. I also tried to understand the world of ideas, what we perceive as merely instrumental, because we are not even aware they actually control us. Lenin stated: “Facts are stubborn” but, being a good ideologist, he did not realise that ideas are even more stubborn than facts, that an idea can destroy a number of facts by pushing them aside. Moreover, its very simple, Lenin’s ideas apparently destroyed a ruling class, repressed religion, and destroyed the Tsar’s myth. Yet, what do we see today? Facts eliminated in the past are sprouting back some seventy or eighty years later. I was astonished to see so many Russian books on the Tsar’s martyrdom, on this saintly Tsar murdered in 1917.
Naturally, we should also learn that being constantly cautious of ideas, errors and illusions is insufficient for acquiring knowledge; absolute certainties and total guarantees just don’t exist.
My second point is about the pertinence of knowledge. What is it all about? It means knowledge is not improved by the use of massive information. Its veracity is none the better if applying sophisticated mathematical calculations. The poet, T.S. Eliot, clearly stated: “How much knowledge is lost with information and how much wisdom is lost in knowledge?”. We do not increase knowledge with information, we don’t become any wiser, we don’t improve an art de vivre with extra knowledge. It has pertinence when we place things in their context. Besides, we know the following rather well: when translating a text into another language, using a dictionary, we can see that key words are poly-semical to the extreme, having up to five or six different meanings. How should we translate a given sentence? Naturally, if we have read the general sense of the text, this helps us out. If, on top, we have the general sense of the paragraph, finding our sentence, this helps us even more. But how does our mind actually work? It moves to and fro, from a global to a partial sense; it specifies a word’s meaning from its global sense and then re-specifies the global sense from its meaning. We are hence shuttled forward. We can place an element, an information within its context only if it is placed in a wider perspective. Let us consider Macedonia for instance: the context and question is not whether Moslem Albanians and Slav Orthodox Christians live in Macedonia, or that the proportion of the population is one third for Moslems and two thirds for the others, but much more: “Why are they here?”. Why is Macedonia, the last heir of a dislocated Yugoslavia, in such crisis? We should go back to the fall of communism, the Yugoslav crisis, the fall of the Ottoman Empire... What actually happened? Its the final dislocation of an empire which had started in 1918 and continues today. So, if we want to put the Balkans in their context, we should include human and ecological factors... all factors should to be analysed.
Let us now take the Aswan Dam as an example. This beautiful and major technical achievement in Egypt, under Nasser’s rule, had an obvious function: produce energy for the Egyptian nation and regulate the flow of a capricious river. The technical team had made all the correct calculations but had forgotten one factor: the dam retained silt which was necessary to fertilise the Nile valley, which in turn retained some fish necessary for feeding the inhabitants of the river bank. This condemned a large majority of peasants to poverty and famine; they started emigrating to the mega-poles of Cairo and Alexandria. Today, there is such an accumulation of silt, that the dam itself is threatened. So, what should have been done? Of course, I don’t know. I’m not an expert but it’s obvious that such works caused other problems: a population flow to the cities which is always difficult to control. Can we now see how important it is to take account of a given context? Teaching via restricted disciplines narrows the mind’s natural ability of placing things in their right context. As teachers, you know very well that a child has a natural aptitude of the mind and this aptitude is putting things in their right place or context. Yet, we teach them quite the opposite.
The world today tends to restrict itself to the fields of politics and economics, exclusively reserved to experts. And, talking of experts, it means partial knowledge. Economics differs from other social sciences but passion, rumours and even panic can be included in this field - panic at the Stock Exchange, for example - and yet here is a science based on calculations. As we know, calculations cannot master the flesh, passion, love, pain; in other words, the very make-up of our lives. It is hence highly important to teach what a context is and, more importantly, integrate its different factors and parts into a WHOLE. I will repeat myself once again, our planet poses us problems of a transversal and global nature. We are now aware of the relationship between a factor and the whole; not only does the whole determine factors but we also know that several factors can influence the whole. This determines an entirely new process of thinking.
My third point is about the human condition, or the human identity.
It seems surprising that a subject so close to our hearts and of direct concern to us, is scattered around. A subject is broken-up into several parts. A biologist stays with biology, a psychologist within psychology... human sciences are split and put into boxes, entirely occulting our identity. In principal, a problem also arises with our paradigm because, as we know well, the way we think is split into two main categories:
• a reductive type of thinking where the difference between humans is a secondary issue but where unity is a key factor. So, here is human unity, a real factor... it’s anatomical, genetical and physiological in nature but remains abstract.
• or, we only see diversity; a diversity of cultures and beliefs but leaving human unity aside, forgetting it’s a key factor of diversity. For example, we tend to use the word “culture”, but culture only exists within other cultures, each with its specificity. We also speak of “the human language” but no-one has ever seen a human language. We can recognise a language by comparing it to other people’s languages in different nations. After all, music exists within music.
In other words, the major problem is for us to think in unitary and multiple terms whilst also accepting the convergence of our two cultures: scientific and humanist cultures; in fact, anything related to Man. In astronomy nowadays, we can be absolutely certain that planet Earth will be found among the stars; i.e. our position in space. An obviously highly marginal position, which should encourage us to take greater care of our community and common habitat; this small habitat being our planet.
Natural science makes us more aware of the different ties that can be found in science. The concept we name geo-biology today, a concept defended by Professor Westbroek, a Dutchman, is based on obvious facts: oxygen is a chemical element coming from the world of plants, oxygen is thus rejected by plants. Limestone is a mineral element formed by the accumulation of fossilised animals and shells. In other words, our planet is made up of physical, chemical and biological elements within a biosphere; and we belong to this biosphere. Of course, we can see our animal heredity through biology and, with pre-history, we can see even further: our development from anthropodoidal societies to the state of homo sapiens lasted seven to eight million years. Our deep historical knowledge makes us better understand our roots in the animal kingdom and the way we can uproot ourselves from where we had originally emerged. Beyond, we should be able to link matters together. Let us take sociology as an example: at university, its a science isolated from history whilst no society can exist without history; it is also isolated from psychology creating thus a form of sociologism where humans become mere puppets, Jack-in-the-boxes, blindly obeying a single god, the sociologist, who knows everything, knows all the truths on the human being, who is an ignorant being, and yet, it’s the sociologist himself who is totally ignorant of the human being. This a clear illustration of what I mean by break-up.
The human being is a Trinitarian being: individual - society - species. In other words, its a being representing itself as an individual, belonging to society and as a given species in time: the human species. Not only are all members of this trinity inseparable, as the trinity in religion, but each can be found in the other, also generating the existence of the other. Why is this so? Surely because an individual is a member of society, can modify it and actually creates it through his/her inter-relationships. So, let’s suppose that a neutron bomb, a nice and clean one, annihilates all the inhabitants of France, only sparing its parliament, the seat of government. There would no longer be a France, no more society.
Individuals are the product of society. It has its own culture which influences an individual in a retro-active manner. The latter can thus evolve as a human being with his/her culture. Thus, we can see the loop occurring between an individual and society: society is within the individual who is within society, because we all possess culture.
The same may be applied to the species: the reproductive process makes us the product of a species but the process will be halted if individuals are not of the opposite sex. We can argue that soon two individuals will no longer be necessary as this process will be replaced by some improved techniques (perhaps we shall no longer be human but, anyway, we’re not at that stage yet). We hence have this trinity make-up: the individual, society and the species, which just cannot be destroyed.
I would like to add that it is insufficient to have an approach via the human sciences alone. Literature and poetry are also factors of a pertinent and profound knowledge. Why? Mostly because, when we read novels, we can perceive individuals as “human subjects”; i.e. they are subject to sentiments and passions, they have character, they can relate to others with love and hate, they belong to society and they make history. In other words, with literature we can gain a real knowledge of the human being. Great novelists, like Dostoievsky or Proust, teach us what human complexity really is; describing the co-existence of several beings within an individual. At the end of Proust’s book Du côté de chez Swann, the hero, Swann, states in a wonderful manner that he was in love for years with Odette and, because of her, suffered jealousy, martyrdom, even obsession. When he was “disintoxicated” from this love, Swann claims: “And to think I wasted so many years of my life wanting to die. To think that my greatest love for a woman was for a woman I didn’t even fancy. She just wasn’t my type”. From this example, can we better perceive how literature reveals our internal multiplicity? Moreover, I find that poetry initiates us to a life of poetical quality. I hence believe that life can be considered as a complementary antagonism between prose and poetry.
Life’s prose is everything we do, what bores us, what we do to conform, what our needs are.
The life of poetry entails everything linked with emotion, pleasure, happiness or joy; it’s a form of love, celebration, communion...
It’s clear that poetry tried to impose itself at a time when prose was omni-present. To illustrate, a problem of symbolical value, I believe, arose recently in France. A Minister decided to apply stricter controls on “rave parties” -i.e. celebrations held in empty spaces- where youngsters go dancing and participate to some quasi-ecstatic communion. There were many protests because prose was trying to take the control of an independent form of poetry. Naturally, this was perilous, but perils exist in society after all. Our poetical experiences should be taught as a way of life, an art de vivre. To survive is not a way of life: surviving enables us to live; living is life’s plenitude.
Concerning the human factor, I think we should analyse our understanding of the homo sapiens. We should also consider that no barrier exists between a homo sapiens and a homo demens, the barrier between reasonable and mad people. An excessively reasonable life is totally mad. Man is also an homo faber, a technician; similarly, in Westbrook’s terms, Man is a homo ludens, as he likes games (and children are not the only ones enjoying play). In France, the sector of games has an important role in the economy; it includes card games, horse-racing, lotteries and the games we go to such as football...
Man is not just a homo economicus, an invention of the XXIst century, interested by mere profit. Man is also a homo mythologicus, living for mythology and myth. Some societies will put all their resources in the construction of tombstones and monuments for the dead rather than lead the life of a living person. Mythology is important because the human being is not just prosaic in nature, he is also a poet. Holderlin stated most poetically: “Man lives on earth”. This isn’t totally true. I think we should accept instead that Man lives on earth for both prosaic and poetical reasons.
My fourth point, a crucial one, concerns human understanding. How can we possibly try to understand each other if we have different cultures, distinct nationalities, differing religions and, at the same time, can barely understand one another within a community or a single family? Too many misunderstandings crop up between father and son, mother and son, mother and daughter, people working in the same office or the same university! How can we tackle this difficulty in understanding one another? We are aware that an egocentric phenomena exists -what the English would call self-deception- which impedes our common human understanding. To get to know a human being, it’s quite insufficient to describe him as an object with grey eyes, six feet tall and weighing 12 stones. Understanding someone is also a subjective action, even an inter-subjective one. An action enabling us to feel this human being as a subject. For example, when we try to understand why someone is crying, we will not exclaim: “Ah! I will take three samples of your tears; I will examine them under a microscope and find out what the salinity content is and what other chemical elements I can find”. I think it’s clear that if we want to understand why this person is crying, we will share his/her sorrow and grief: understanding someone requires empathy and a form of sympathy. The notion of understanding is one of the fundamental things we can teach children because miscomprehensions immediately appear when quarrelling or when we have to compete. We should also demonstrate the vicious circle of quarrels: insults by one party will always cause greater insults from the other. We should also try to understand that reducing a person to a single characteristic is obviating our look at all the other traits of its personality. Hegel said: “to reduce someone committing a crime to that of a criminal, is to forget all other aspects of his/her personality”. When we say: “What a bastard, its disgusting”, we actually reduce an individual to a role that is undoubtedly grossly exaggerated. So, we have now tackled the notion of understanding.
My fifth point covers the notion of confronting uncertainties. This is all the more important because teaching methods prone absolute truths and certainties. Uncertainty is tackled by science and, more particularly in physics, where various technical methods are applied. Uncertainty, however, is part of human history. Today, most fortunately, no-one can say what will happen next month or next year, because we have now abandoned our mechanistic determinism of history. In life’s history, we are aware of the experiences we have undergone like the extinction of the dinosaurs; entire civilisations collapsed with the arrival of the Conquistadores: by setting the great Inca chief a trap, a few armed men on horseback destroyed a gigantic empire. Such historical U-turns can be numerous.
In other words, the real problem rests in confrontation. Naturally, there are many ways we confront things. We can use small fetishes and/or amulets to help us out; we can also read our horoscope or consult a fortune-teller. We then have a sense of security and feel protected. But this is insufficient because it’s not really important. What is important, is our capacity to confront uncertainty and prepare for the unexpected. Euripides, at the end of three tragedies, wrote: “It is not what we expect that unveils itself to us; an evil god always brings the unexpected”. Today, with our acquired knowledge, we should re-learn this 2,500 year old lesson. Moreover, our human adventure remains as unknown as it has always been in the past. It’s more important to be aware of the risks we actually create by our actions; it’s remaining aware that certain actions may drift away from what we had originally intended. That’s where some strategy may come in useful. Unlike programmes, strategy is the art of grasping and managing uncertainties and, to some extent, integrating fate.
I’ll put it simply, it’s just like looking at first-page headlines of a magazine, which brings me to my sixth point: the planetary era.
We all speak nowadays of transnational influences and globalisation but, in reality, this had already taken place in the XVIth century, with the conquest of the Americas and our navigation around the globe. The unifying force in this world was first started by germs, a microbial unification: germs from the western world threw themselves on unlucky Indian populations. In return, we received the syphilitic germ; it travelled with great speed, from Spain to Shanghai, following the silk route. Other exchanges were more positive: our maize, potatoes or tomatoes all come from America; we, in turn, introduced wheat, the horse etc...
So, this planetary era is not just a question of fancy exchanges, it also encompasses domination, oppression and colonisation. I believe this phenomena should be included in our history books with a crucial idea: western Europe dominated the world till the XXth century bringing with it the worst: it recreated slavery and domination. The West, in a larger context, still dominates the world today, bringing with it the germs that became an antidote to domination, thus enabling colonised and enslaved peoples to use it for their self-emancipation. In this respect, I had previously cited Montaigne and Bartolomeo de las Casas. I would like to refer to Montaigne again, in Lettres Persannes, for his critical approach to France and the West in general. Similarly, the ideas behind Human Rights, the rights of nations and democracy are more general but, when they become global, are antidotes to our current globalisation process; a global economic hegemony based on profit alone.
In other words, we are living in an era of double-globalisation, one running on twin propellers:
• a propeller of domination: this dominating force continues today and is based on profit;
• the other propeller is based on emancipation, rights and freedom, all tending towards sharing the earth in a fraternal community and one, single fatherland.
Naturally, we don’t know which of the two will gain greater control. I think it important, however, to stress that, from now onwards, all humans have common problems, live in a community sharing the same fate and face similar problems concerning life and death.
We come to my seventh point I call anthro-poetical. This is implicit in what I have already said concerning the human trinity: individuals, fragments of a species and fragments of society.
We thus have three immediate duties: a duty towards ourselves, our honour and our self-respect (or bella figura, in Italian terms). We also have duties towards society because, as citizens, we are part of a system where the controlled should control the controllers; i.e. we should take on responsibilities because we have to be responsible. We hence have duties in order to claim our rights. We have a duty towards humanity as a whole, today more than ever before, because it is placed amid a global system, our planet earth.
So, we have a duty in developing our personal autonomy, individual responsibilities, social activities as well as our general participation within Mankind. I think I can conclude on this idea and would like to thank you for your patience.
