This article appears in the June 9, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
BOOK REVIEW
French Report on Education:
Solving the Universal Problem
[Print version of this article]
La désintégration contrôlée de l’éducation: Ce que tout parent et enseignant devrait savoir
(The Controlled Disintegration of Education: What Every Parent and Teacher Should Know)
by Alexandra Bellea-Noury, Maëlle Mercier, Odile Mojon-Cheminade, Christophe Lavernhe, and Sébastien Périmony, with a Preface by Jacques Cheminade
Paris: Solidarité et Progrès, 2023
www.solidariteetprogres.org,
Paperback, 192 pp., €42
May 30—In February, a research team from the French political party, Solidarité et Progrès, published a groundbreaking 192-page Special Report titled, La désintégration contrôlée de l’éducation: Ce que tout parent et enseignant devrait savoir (The Controlled Disintegration of Education: What Every Parent and Teacher Should Know). The authors have documented the destruction of the teaching profession in France through regular pay cuts, and, more disturbingly, through the change in method and goals of the education of the students. Whether by no longer being able to live on a teaching salary, or by being sick of teaching to a test, French teachers are leaving the profession in alarming numbers. The situation across the European Union and the United States and elsewhere is similar.
The report focuses on specific problems in the classroom that originate with the increasing amount of time that children spend in front of a screen and also the content of what is displayed on that screen, be it a video game or social media content. The adverse effects of the digital devices on the students are many, ranging from loss of concentration span, loss of memory, and in general, creation of an environment that does not assist in the education of young and developing minds.
The chapter, “Cognitive Sciences in School,” for example, details the difference between human thought and computer “thought.” Understanding human intelligence and the way to nurture it in children is key to understanding what is important in education. No aspect of a child’s education should be viewed as mechanistic. Further, the chapter, “Education to Indoctrination,” describes the effects of a curriculum politicized to promote a radical environmental strategy. The chapter titled, “The Collapse of Education, Fruit of the Changing Global Paradigm,” discusses how manipulation of the uneducated masses is conduited through video games and social media.
Deadening Screen Time
Several chapters of the report detail the scientific evidence of damage to developing minds from the physical effects of prolonged screen time, as well as the negative psychological effects of social media, fake support groups, and video games that are engaged in indoctrination. This primarily affects children, although adults are not immune. Digital devices have become mainstays in French classrooms, as they have in the U.S. and elsewhere.
As most teachers know, the classroom is the place where a student, from whatever background, will be safe to learn about his or her mind, and be able to develop his individual creative potential in the numerous fields of study presented in the class with the guidance of the teacher. Once the teacher is relegated to telling students to write a report from information gathered on the internet, the classroom experience begins to disintegrate.
In the United States
In the United States, on May 23, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the menace of social media and screen addiction. The 19-page advisory, titled “Surgeon General Issues New Advisory About Effects Social Media Use Has on Youth Mental Health,” focuses on the ways that social media may harm children and adolescents. Surgeon General Murthy cites the risk of profound harm to adolescent mental health and urges families to set time limits on exposure and urges governments to require the posting of warnings on social media of potential harm to mental health—on Facebook (Meta), Instagram, and the others—preferably by the Surgeon General.
Curricula Crisis
The situation regarding curricula is also not substantially different in the United States from that described in the Special Report for France. Outstanding is the promotion of the ideology for population reduction, in the name of caring for the planet and “nature.” Curricula promoting the global warming scare and the rabid reduction of energy production are in wide use—which help to confuse students about the real world and what it takes to be responsible for the continuation of life, human and otherwise. This is having extreme effects on young children psychologically, as well as being poor science and lacking in thought and debate.
In my personal experience, when I was 10, I watched a TV documentary about man’s careless destruction of the planet and how the world was coming to an end before I would grow up. I was profoundly depressed by it. Fortunately, there were no social media then, or else I might have had 15 avatars pop up to “support” my depression.
Throughout history there have been individuals and movements to stop the nonsense thinking and to do what was advised by Lazare Carnot, the renowned French engineer and leader (1753-1823), and what others have echoed—to educate to raise every man and woman of the human species to the “dignity of Man.” The fight for education continues the battle against tyranny, a fight that is worth fighting and winning.
Creativity for the Common Good, Not Conformity
The Preface to the book is provided by statesman Jacques Cheminade, a longtime co-thinker and associate of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and a life-long champion of education in the service of truth and of advancing humanity. Jacques Cheminade is Chairman of the Solidarité et Progrès political party in France, and has campaigned for decades, including four times as a presidential candidate, to raise the level of knowledge and political level in France to that of the citizen-statesman. A translation of the full text of his Preface to this Special Report is provided below.
Cheminade begins with quotations from three prominent figures from the past century to underscore his main point, that teachers must raise up students to think and to contribute, and not simply to adapt and conform to that which is constraining or even undermining society. He summarizes:
The mission is to cultivate the innate potential in each human being to know, understand, and to act for the common good, to awaken the joy of thinking and creating; [however] today the teacher’s job is to teach students how to conform. These are the skills and operational formulae to serve an existing social system to which the child is asked to adapt, because he is not provided with the means to question it in order to design a better one. Under the pretext of letting him “discover” by himself, he is submitting himself to the rules of the dominant order. In short, a new form of slavery, mental slavery comes into existence.
The importance of education everywhere is to do as Jacques Cheminade, Jean Jaurès, Lazare Carnot, Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, have done, which is to educate for the betterment of all people everywhere. It is hard to do that or to even think that way when you are living in a slave system. The necessity of a productive economy, be it in France or elsewhere, requires an education system that functions with well-paid and well-respected teachers, and a curriculum that allows the student to flourish and find the area in which to develop his or her own innate creativity, be it medicine, art, or myriad other fields of study.
The nightmarish challenge of teaching a classroom of individuals with no concentration span, massive anxiety, and other such real problems has to be taken seriously, and teachers must be given the resources to prevail. It must be taken seriously that there are knowable forces indoctrinating children and turning once poetic souls into deeply depressed, anxiety-ridden individuals at best, and at worst, at least in the U.S., into killers.
References
Though available only in French, this Special Report is important to the large, international group of French-reading parents, educators, and all concerned.
To our English-language readers, I recommend that you dust off your high school French and read this Report.
Here are three of the published books and studies referenced in this report that are in English.
B.J. Fogg. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (Interactive Technologies). Morgan Kauffmann, 2003.
T. Dalton Combs and A.B. Ramsay. Digital Behavioral Design, Boundless Mind (pp. 1-13). Independently published, 2018.
Natasha D. Schüll. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton University Press, 2012.
