A lively debate is going on at the moment with us about a course in world history at CEGEP. One of the important elements of this debate concerns the place to be given, or not, to Antiquity and the Middle Ages: the new course will indeed begin in the Renaissance and arouse strong criticism for this, including those formulated in these pages by the former premier of Quebec Lucien Bouchard.
What should we pass on from the past through education? This is one of the broad and important questions that this debate raises. What should we pass on to everyone, as future citizens? But also, what should we pass on to specialists in various fields? What, for example, should future mathematicians, physicists, accountants know about the history of mathematics, physics, accounting, and so on?
Answering these questions certainly requires a lot of knowledge, but also involves the relationship we have with our past. This is sometimes controversial and we can clearly see it in the discussions on our new history course at CEGEP.
We also see it in a heated academic debate currently underway in the United States and France.
The classics in the pillory
Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s career is truly out of the ordinary. Born in the Dominican Republic, he arrived in the United States with his family in 1989. He was four years old at the time. His father returned home, but his mother remained in the United States, with him and his new little brother, American by birth. Their journey is one of the most abject poverty and leads them to shabby housing, from where they are evicted for default of payment, in shelters for the homeless.
Little Padilla loves to read and reads a lot about Antiquity. In 1994, in a Brooklyn shelter, he was spotted by a well-known photographer who volunteered there. This encourages him, sponsors him. Thanks to a scholarship, the child is admitted to an excellent school where his brilliance makes him notice. His passion for the world of Antiquity does not leave him. He is learning Greek and Latin – and French! He continued his brilliant studies at Princeton, Oxford, Stanford, and became a professor at Columbia, then at Princeton, where he currently teaches. His teaching and research focus on the Roman world and fall within what is called in English the field of ” classics ».
But it has also been known, for a few years, to demand an in-depth revision, or even, if it is not accomplished, its outright disappearance.
His words are sometimes very harsh. These classics, given as the foundation of Western culture, are full of racism and white privilege, and they feed them; they never ceased to be claimed yesterday by fascists and Nazis, today by the extreme right and white supremacists; they justified slavery, colonialism, pseudoscientific racism, and so on.
I am not entering into this heated quarrel which has just transposed itself in France where one evokes “these historians of Antiquity who hate Antiquity”, to quote a specialist in classical letters, Raphaël Doan.
But it seems to me right and important to remember, on the one hand, that if the fascists claimed to be classics, the slaves in struggle were also inspired by Spartacus and feminists, from Medea; on the other hand, that it is only fair and desirable that our reading of Antiquity be enriched with current concerns and new works, precisely like those of Padilla on slavery in the Roman Empire.
However, I would like to say a word about all this in connection with the education and training of teachers.
Plato, for example …
I will argue first, against a certain contemporary relativism, that certain works of Antiquity undeniably have an immense intrinsic value, by which they are, in effect, superior to others. We can see it better with the example of science and mathematics. I have just finished a chapter on Archimedes for a book. Anyone who knows math knows that his work is absolutely brilliant and that if we did a Mount Rushmore of math, Archimedes’ face would be there… Do you teach this subject? You need to know him, be able to tell his story and explain his accomplishments.
Especially since this work also had an impact on the sciences and subsequent mathematics. It inspires them, enriches them, becomes a scale for the future. “Those who are able to understand Archimedes admire less the discoveries of the greatest modern men”, assured Leibniz. He is right and this work has importance and value for that too.
It is also the case, even if it is sometimes less incontestable, for literary, artistic, philosophical works, which have value in themselves and by the influence which they have had.
Take, in education, the case of Plato. His thought on education puts him on Mount Rushmore in pedagogy. And it had over it a decisive, often beneficial and salutary influence that the discerning eye recognizes everywhere.
You can debate your ideas, challenge them, disagree with them. But for that, you have to know them.
I therefore argue that one should not work in education without having carefully read and meditated on Plato. Then Rousseau, then Dewey.
And many more, of course.
Editor’s Note
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