In the West, the teaching profession is destroyed because its structure is incompatible with the structures of the dominant postmodern culture. It can be reborn, if we free ourselves from this culture, in spirit and in practice. My experience is mostly French, but the deadly disease afflicting this profession is epidemic throughout the Western world.
I will not take up your time by repeating what you know perfectly well—the miserable remuneration, the lack of social consideration, the declining level of the students (attested by the most reliable international ratings), the recruitment crisis, etc. This unfortunate situation is the inevitable result of the application of the principles of the shared postmodern culture. It is absolutely useless to try to remedy such a situation within the framework of this culture, since, if we admit the validity of these principles, chaos and fiasco must be considered a great achievement, and the more complete the stampede, the more complete the triumph.
It would take an entire book to explain this demonstratively. I will briefly and bluntly show the necessary relationships between the main postmodern theses (Part 1) and the destruction of the teaching profession (Part 2).
1. What is Postmodern Ideology?
Postmodernity has at times attempted to define itself, and we will not comment on these definitions, which are often as obstuse as what they attempt to define. Postmodernity seems impenetrable, because it is formulated in an argot that deconstructs syntax and the lexicon. However, the theses of postmodernity, stated without pedantry, and without Gongorism, are not all that difficult to understand.
Postmodernity begins, like modernity (Descartes, above all), with a general skepticism, but which “suspects” even more than it “doubts.” Very classically, universal skepticism (that I know nothing) allows itself to be transformed like a glove, in the Hegelian manner, into absolute knowledge and absolute idealism (I am everything, I know everything). Of course, in modern classical philosophy, this absolute “I,” or at least this transcendental “I,” is not the individual “I” of Peter or Paula, but the common, almost divine background of Peter and Paula. Everything is subjective, but there is some truth; and it is so because all the subjects have this in common: that they are the only fundamental Subject. Thus, when Peter or Paula know the truth, that which thinks is not really Peter or Paula, but it is Reason, God, the Vernunft, who thinks in Peter or Paula.
Thus, in the Enlightenment, especially the deeper German one, monotheistic metaphysics may be abandoned, but the uniqueness of the metaphysical foundation remains, and also the universality of the moral law with its strict obligation. Postmodernism aims above all at getting rid of classical, Christian, popular moral obligation, and therefore of the moral law (conceived as neurotic moralism), and of the unique Arche necessary for its foundation, and of all thought that is structured around this Arche. This Destruktion, Abbau, is what is called “deconstruction.” They also call it “exiting metaphysics.” However, this exit from metaphysics is nothing more than an exit from the metaphysics of the One, and an entry into a polytheistic metaphysics. This is also the reason why they reject essences (they criticize “essentialism”) and the Logos that accompanies them. This is what they call “the overthrow of Platonism,” but also of the Kantian transcendental, etc. The Kantian “transcendental I” is replaced by a “transcendental we,” and this is the deeper meaning of the postmodern slogan: “everything is a social construction.” The modern (Kantian) transcendental constructs the phenomenon, as the divine Logos creates Nature. This is the case of the postmodern transcendental. Since this “transcendental We” is obviously conceived as incarnated and social, it is necessary that everything be a “social construction.”
Of course, this transcendental cannot have the function of imposing an objective unity on the phenomenon, but only of ensuring pluralism and the contractual community of constituent subjectivities, without allowing us to believe that subjective opinions are less than a truth. Therefore, this transcendental can only be language. For language is common. “All is language” means that there are only languages with their rules, which are free for all, and their contents, which are not facts but interpretations. The object of the intersubjective transcendental is to impose on phenomenal reality the a priori form of arbitrary individual freedom. (This is the philosophy of an insane asylum). The phenomenal is nothing more than a set of “voices,” of individual discourses included in languages. They are languages that have their meaning not in a unitary reality or in a referent, but in themselves. “There is nothing outside the text,” said Derrida.
They speak to us of cultural relativism—but, in reality, we are facing the absolutism of a polytheistic metaphysics. Postmodernity is presented to us as a critical theory—but, in reality, we are in the presence of a dogmatic polytheism. And the proof of this system lies in the affirmation, which of course seems legitimate to them, of an arbitrary individual freedom. Each people had their gods. And here, each individual has his own god, which is himself, and all that he wants. God is so because He is Sovereign and Creator. He can do what He wants because His affirmation would be creative.
We already know what this ideology consists of. Let us now see why it destroys the teaching profession.
2. The Destruction of the Teaching Profession by Postmodern Culture
The Crisis of the Fundamental Structures of Education
Since the time of modernity, universal methodical “doubt” was already capable of putting all the foundations of education in crisis, establishing an individual, independent of all authority and tradition. However, the crisis did not occur. In fact, in the Cartesian and Kantian traditions, this “doubt” was used to reinforce scientific and moral objectivity. Furthermore, the child was conceived of as a “savage,” a nature without reason or freedom, which had to be introduced into civilization by methodically establishing reason against irrational, superstitious, authoritarian, etc. prejudices. Hence a rationalist education with liberal intentions, but with moralistic and very authoritarian praxis. Postmodern education is right when it reacts against this hardening of educational practice. Unfortunately, by adopting the opposite view to positivism and Kantianism, it transforms “doubt” and “suspicion” into machines of war trained against moral and scientific objectivity. This is how the foundations of education are destroyed.
When there is “instruction,” someone teaches something to another. Now, on the basis of postmodern ideology, there is simply nothing to learn, since fundamentally there is nothing objective and supra-individual. With the dissolution of strong reason, an absolute equality is established a priori between the one who knows and the one who is ignorant. Hence the children who believe they know everything, and the teachers who are ashamed of knowledge. If all opinions are equal, it is not understood why a student should make an effort to learn opinions that are no more valuable than those he already has and that cost him no effort. Since the child becomes equal to the teacher, not as a person, but as a subject of knowledge and culture, the relationship immediately becomes conflictual between teacher and student, if the teacher wants to do his job. The professor is useless and has no legitimacy, unless he begins to practice a loathsome demagogy—he encourages the stupid pride of the ignorant who think they know everything and who rebel at the idea of depending on outside help to acquire knowledge; he flatters the prodigious idiots who imagine they can reinvent 40,000 years of human culture ab ovo. Moreover, he has no legitimacy, if he tries to establish a working classroom, necessarily hierarchical, with obligations and a reasoned acceptance of the needs for order. The professor is only legitimate, if he establishes a climate of intellectual and moral anarchy, from which the order of an egalitarian and libertarian society of solidarity is supposed to emerge spontaneously, through the suppression of all frustrations. The result of this is the suppression of all discipline and all work, in a total absence of grading, scoring, selection.
The result of this nonsense is a total collapse of school outcomes, but this is stubbornly denied by the defenders of this system. The only relevant comparison is that of Soviet agriculture. The agricultural fiasco in the USSR was known to all, but no one dared to take measures, because that would have required contradicting the ideology—if collectivization gives bad results, it is because collectivization has not been carried far enough.
The Crisis of Teaching Mathematics
Obviously, under these conditions, mathematics becomes not only politically incorrect, as it was thirty years ago, but racist, fascist and “logophallocratic,” as Derrida said. Mathematical truth must be democratically constituted in discussion groups, where the racist and sexist stereotypes of apodictic rationality are unlearned, in favor of a synallagmatic rationality. All this is perfectly infantile or delirious, so that for utilitarianism, we put up with what may be of interest for technology and we allow a residue of mathematical education. But in this education, already reduced to a minimum, except for a small elite, an effort is made to eliminate demonstration as far as possible.
It is a matter of preventing the student, as far as possible, from having the intellectual and spiritual experience of geometry, which is and remains fundamental for the awakening of rationality, not the Western, white, masculine or heterosexual rationality, but rationality itself, as the power to know in person and with objective certainty a truth. In other words, it is a matter, in theory, of freeing the student from any objectivity susceptible of oppressing the arbitrary individual freedom of the superman. In practice, it is a matter of enslaving the son of the people. The rational animal, deprived of reason, is nothing more than a psychically confused and disoriented animal, deprived as he is of rigid instinctive norms. Seduced by demagogy, he may adhere to the polytheistic ideal of the superman as the creator of truth, good and being—but the reality of his life is transformed into that of a subhuman, increasingly enslaved to a plutocratic-bureaucratic-perverse world order.
The Crisis of Literary and Humanistic Education
As cultural relativism becomes absolute, the teaching of a particular culture to a particular audience no longer has any legitimacy. In other words, the content of the teaching of the humanities can only consist of a necessarily very superficial vision of all cultures, eliminating any hierarchy between the various types of discourses, within the framework of an ideology where absolute truth is the absence of truth, and where the absolute good is that each individual can have his or her own good (or truth). In the context of this universal ideological privatization, any transmission of elements of the cultural commons, including the mother tongue and the stylistic norms recognized by common sense and tradition, are not only useless, but harmful and “toxic.”
The Crisis of Teaching History
Enlightened modernity deduces from universal “doubt” a tabula rasa of History, which is nothing but the history of the aberrations of the human race, or (positively) that of progress towards modernity. As for postmodernity, it represents the end of history, since universal human society has finally become the true universal pantheon. The end of History is its total fulfillment, the rediscovered paradise of the Empire of Freedom—this is the postmodern Great Story, but it is presented as the end of the great stories (apart from this one). What is the point of studying political, economic or cultural history under these conditions, since the only lesson to be drawn from it consists in a celebration of the present time, which has become eternal and finally perfect? Moreover, a radical critique of the past is no longer necessary and would run the risk of becoming counterproductive, if the superhuman gods, who have become mostly subhuman, finally realize the reality of their situation?
The Crisis of Moral Education
The privatization of the good does not only mean a privatization of morality—each individual has his own. But since morality, in all civilizations up to the present day, consists of a common good, a good way of living together and an agreement on valid norms, postmodern moral education can only consist, in the first place, of an education in amorality. But that is not all. If all identity is violence and the product of unjustifiable domination, moral education must consist in the promotion of “difference,” which is in reality an ethics of transgression, which contradictorily needs to establish the law in order to violate it, because if it is not established, how can it be violated?
The Crisis of Religious and Civic Education
This postmodernity is a metaphysics and a religion. But this religion, being purely immanent, becomes a politics. And this politics is that of a Democracy, which is much more than a political regime. Society is, in effect, the “Absolute We”—more than a church, a Pantheon. This position of an intersubjective Pantheon, of a social transcendental and purely immanent to the democratic community, is what is usually called secularization. But this is obviously the opposite of what is called secularization or, in French, laicism. It is an absolute democracy, for the self-deified sovereign individuals are theoretically supermen. The most absolute tolerance is supposed to reign among the gods who recognize themselves as gods, but this tolerance turns into absolute intolerance against everything that is not this dogmatic polytheism. The most complete equality is supposed to reign in this democracy—but in reality, in the absence of natural law (at least in the Hobbesian sense), postmodern liberalism leads only to the Hobbesian state of nature, to the right of the strongest, the richest; and the weakest, instead of being supermen, are subhuman. The obsessive critique of domination, in postmodernity, is a residue of modernity, in a leftist form (egalitarian-libertarian anarchist)—but this residue is lived in the belief in superhumanity. In fact, this makes the masses fall into a subhuman condition for the benefit of the total power of the supermen. That is why the crisis of education becomes the end of democracy. But they say that this end of democracy is its apex. Of course, if a man can be a woman, or a woman a man, a dictatorship can be a democracy and a democracy a dictatorship. We already know—everything is a social construction.
Conclusion
How Can You Revive Your Profession?
Without a cultural revolution, this is impossible. This cultural revolution may seem impossible, because an ideology that tells people that they are gods represents the supreme degree of demagogy and such culture offers an incomparable satisfaction of self-esteem superior to any other. However, such culture is a collection of nonsense that precludes all objective thinking, and all serious social morality, and therefore all trust and all rational management of public affairs. It is inevitable that these idiocies will eventually collide with the only cause of destruction of absurd ideologies—bankruptcy, the wall of hunger, the immoderation of geopolitical ambitions, the underestimation of adversaries, and finally military defeat in the face of the rational opponents of the world empire of postmodernity.
If teachers want to return to a meaningful profession, they must detach themselves from this postmodern culture and stop serving the promotion of this postmodern democracy that finally assumes the horrible face of a domination by an elite of supermen of an amorphous mass of subhumans, half of whom practice voluntary and happy servitude through their taste for demagogy which enslaves them in reality while divinizing them in imagination.
Featured: Der Schulmeister von Eßlingen (The Schoomaster of Esslingen), by the Master of the Codex Manesse, painted ca. 1305-1340. [Codex Manesse, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 292v (UB Heidelberg.]
