Counter to the urgencies of our time and the necessities imposed by the future, the reform on the teaching of history in high schools seems all the more incomprehensible as its misleading presentation distorts the debate: behind the apparent quarrel over the allocation and distribution of class hours between the first and final year looms an attempt to discreetly discard a discipline, simply accused, according to Richard Descoings (Le Monde of December 10, 2009), of delaying the progress of future science baccalaureate holders. It is indeed difficult to follow the “rational” argument of the director of Sciences-Po on this point: should one truly blame history hours for the “brain drain from scientific education”? Is history responsible for the “lack of intellectual eagerness of new generations for mathematics”? Let’s not mistake the symptom for the cause!
A strange censure of a subject that aids in understanding the world when other sciences are failing: while the economy collapses, plunging its experts into abysses of perplexity, as international law, deprived of its strength, seems to betray its promises, and politics carefully avoids crossing paths with ethics, let us applaud, in homage to its masters at the Sorbonne, that it alone, unwavering in its cruelty, faithful to its glorious hours, history endures!
To those tempted to degrade it to the rank of an indigestible knowledge, liable to be casually disposed of “at the end of the first year” by an exam, it is worth reminding, to paraphrase Plato, that history can claim the status of a “true knowledge,” conveyed by emotion and capable of nurturing, like literature or philosophy, human reflection throughout a lifetime. As the president himself notes in his column on national identity, the “need for anchoring and reference points,” the “duty to remember” invoked moreover by the Elysee, can alone overcome the growing peril of intolerance, as disaffiliation threatens to sever the fragile societal link, does it not belong to history to disseminate, through analyses of a past, the one where every human being draws to enrich themselves with the experience of their ancestors, this emotional charge coupled with an identity presence contained in its symbols? Far from confining, from constraining the future, historical reading opens up and amplifies the intelligibility of the world. Provided we “move out of the short-sightedness of democracies,” obsessed with “policies of immediacy” and “short-termism,” as explained in a recent article by Pierre Rosanvallon (Le Monde of December 8, 2009) who proposes the “creation of an Academy of the Future” to reflect on the consequences of climate changes.
While current generations of students, born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, already regard the Cold War as a television thriller and consider the atrocities of World War II as one of those “ordinary misfortunes” that “civilized” man knowingly reserves for his fellow humans, the awareness of the thickness of time to which the professor at the Collège de France refers, appears as an effective remedy to the desymbolization of the world.
At a time when all business schools are reintroducing, at the students’ request, history in the form of seminars illuminating the geopolitical uncertainties of the contemporary world, it is not useless to recall – thanks to history! – what became of scientists driven solely by the concern of performance by an ideology that advocated the “neutrality and purity of science”: a science cleaved from the real, held out of time. A delusion for some. An abomination for all others.
