In his speech on September 29th on “the professional orientation of young people,” Nicolas Sarkozy indirectly mentioned the essential characteristic of this adolescent period: the pursuit of “autonomy.” Recalling the “absurdity” of having to “choose one’s life following a single meeting,” the President of the Republic adopted the observations of specialists in this age group: adolescence is a cataclysm that leads to so many troubling reassessments that, in the years following its onset, the adolescent gropes, searches, experiments, and tries out new identifications that replace the old, often parental ones. “No definitive choice,” he summarized, even advocating a “right” to challenge an initial orientation.
These words are all the more welcome as new forms of work organization differently influence the course of careers: a young worker can no longer ignore that they are preparing to change careers several times in their life depending on opportunities and future prospects. Gone is the vertical progression within the same company, making way for lateral changes. Adaptability now replaces expertise in the criteria that value the individual.
However, the recommendations from the Elysée leave us wanting more. If several thousand young people abandon their studies in the first year, it is, they often explain, because “they made a mistake.” “We didn’t like it,” they admit spontaneously before pondering: “but how can one know when one doesn’t know oneself?” Listening to those entering the IUT de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, one systematically hears complaints directed at the professional orientation system in high schools: selections determined almost exclusively based on grades, no discussion taking into account individual backgrounds and desires that might express a career choice, or even, *horresco referens*, a “passion”! It’s clear where the problem lies: the staff responsible for these matters, like any human being unprepared to receive the “emotions” of another, retreat behind an administrative document, sometimes a test, an unchangeable truth safeguarding them from their own emotions. Let us remind ourselves of a basic truth: without clinical interpretation, without a well-nourished human exchange where the emotional weight of words adds color to the grayness of percentages, a test, sometimes brandished as an infallible oracle of the machine, holds no value.
It is not without reason that the training of future judges will include a psychological dimension: the Outreau affair demonstrated the limits of legal competence, however brilliant, when a human is destabilized by their own recollections in a case dealing with child sexuality. Those whose delicate task it is to guide 17-year-olds cannot ignore the often painful identity questioning of their interlocutors, which is nonetheless the keystone of their professional approach. However, it requires accepting without fear to be “stirred,” “touched” by the other’s words and drawing a more refined understanding of their request from them. It is certainly not about psychoanalyzing the national education… Educating remains a “profession as impossible as governing and psychoanalyzing,” as Sigmund Freud liked to point out.
For this “diverse youth,” explained the President of the Republic in Avignon, no “autonomy kit” exists on the market. Certainly not that of money, contrary to what the Académie de Créteil seems to believe, which proposes, on an “experimental” basis, to “pay vocational high school classes to combat absenteeism.” A significant stone in the garden of the Elysian “new financial morality,” so fervently defended at the last G20 summits! Let us beware that the “effective orientation” desired by the President of the Republic does not inadvertently become an orientation of mere “performance.”
