The Gift of Doubt and Reason

’La lib­erté poli­tique con­tribue à ren­dre les hommes dignes d’elle, à en faire des citoyens ni con­formistes ni re­belles, mais cri­tiques et re­spon­s­ables.’

Ray­mond Aron, French philoso­pher

As I en­tered the Con­fer­ence Hall at Paris-Dauphine Uni­ver­sity on a re­cent visit, I was struck by the force of a quo­ta­tion by Ray­mond Aron that was proudly dis­played above its en­trance. It stated that po­lit­i­cal free­dom has the in­her­ent power to make us all wor­thy of that very same free­dom, in that it en­cour­ages us to be­come cit­i­zens who are nei­ther con­formist nor re­bel­lious, but crit­i­cal and re­spon­si­ble. At a time when un­de­mo­c­ra­tic ex­trem­ism of all per­sua­sions is gain­ing wider cur­rency on both sides of the At­lantic, I wel­come Aron’s golden mid­dle way as rep­re­sent­ing the voice of rea­son and mod­er­a­tion.

In a con­text of global in­sta­bil­ity, fake news and om­nipo­tent al­go­rithms, I be­lieve we should be pro­mot­ing a deep sense of cit­i­zen­ship and civic re­spon­si­bil­ity in our schools. Be­yond the trans­mis­sion of knowl­edge, we have a duty to help young peo­ple be­come crit­i­cal, re­spon­si­ble cit­i­zens of sound judge­ment who can de­velop their own view­points on a range of local and global is­sues. Crit­i­cal so that they doubt and do not blindly ac­cept what­ever comes their way, re­spon­si­ble so that they adopt a con­struc­tive at­ti­tude.

In­deed, to em­power young peo­ple to build a bet­ter fu­ture, we need to give them reg­u­lar op­por­tu­ni­ties to hone their an­a­lyt­i­cal and crit­i­cal think­ing skills. Like­wise for the art of di­a­logue and ne­go­ti­a­tion, the ca­pac­ity to col­lab­o­rate and solve prob­lems to­gether, the re­spect of dif­fer­ence. These can no longer be a sim­ple by-prod­uct that can be dis­pensed with when we are pressed for time to cover the cur­ricu­lum. On the con­trary, they should be at the cen­tre of our ed­u­ca­tional ef­forts so that every stu­dent can con­sciously and sys­tem­at­i­cally ac­quire these fun­da­men­tal qual­i­ties.

The French tra­di­tion of cafés philosophiques goes back to 1992, when Marc Sautet or­gan­ised the first pub­lic forum of this sort at Café des Phares in Paris. To this day, every Sun­day morn­ing, peo­ple of di­verse ori­gin and con­di­tion flock to this café on Place de la Bastille to dis­cuss a range of is­sues of pub­lic im­por­tance. Ed­u­ca­tion­al­ists such as Michel Tozzi have adapted this tra­di­tion to the school en­vi­ron­ment so that stu­dents of all lev­els are equipped with the right tools to dis­cuss age-ap­pro­pri­ate ques­tions.

A café-philo should not be an emo­tional dis­cus­sion of opin­ions to con­vince oth­ers of our truth - no­tice that the et­y­mol­ogy of that verb, from Latin vinco, in­cludes the idea of pre­vail­ing, de­feat­ing, con­quer­ing. It is, in­stead, a ra­tio­nal de­bate of ideas so that we can learn from oth­ers, in­spire oth­ers and build so­ci­ety with oth­ers. It is not a ques­tion of being right (avoir rai­son), but of rea­son­ing things out to­gether (raison­ner). Over the years, I have con­ducted many cafés-philo with pri­mary and sec­ondary stu­dents, and I can as­sure you that they rise to the chal­lenge and ap­pre­ci­ate the op­por­tu­nity to be heard.

Martha Nuss­baum tells the story of a de­bate on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment that she once or­gan­ised with her fresh­men at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. She asked one of the stu­dents to speak against it and, at first, the young man re­fused on the grounds that he was a fer­vent sup­porter. Upon her in­sis­tence, he was obliged to pre­pare a range of ar­gu­ments op­pos­ing the death penalty and, while he did not change his mind after the de­bate, he was grate­ful that the re­search he had con­ducted helped him un­der­stand the views of oth­ers.

If we wish to in­oc­u­late young peo­ple against the many prophets of sal­va­tion in­hab­it­ing our brave new world, let us fol­low Aron’s ex­am­ple and offer them the pre­cious gift of doubt and rea­son.

opin­ion ed­u­ca­tion