Wow: French students required to take philosophy< creigalt2 >
What Does It All Mean? Once a Year, French Students Try to Explain.
By Catherine Porter
The French were grappling with two questions this week. Not whether President Trump would hurl insults and leave the Group of 7 early or who the least-known player in the World Cup is.
Instead, they were asking: Can one be happy when others are not? And, Do we have control of our words?
The questions were part of this year’s written test in philosophy, taken at the exact same time each year around the country by more than a half-million 17- and 18-year-olds. The students, who have spent all year taking a required course in philosophy, have to answer one of two questions, or dissect a philosophical tract. This year, the tract came from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1878 book, “Human, All Too Human.”
Students have four hours to write their responses. The exam is such an important part of French education that local news outlets commit live-blogs to it, beside their rolling updates on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, and invite philosophers to discuss their own responses to the questions on the radio and television and in newspapers.
“For me, the philosophy exam says everything about who we are,” said Édouard Geffray, France’s education minister. He was speaking from the yard of a high school he visited on Monday to crack open exam packages in front of television cameras and pass them out to students, and also to offer some last-minute nonphilosophical advice about proofreading...
Napoleon introduced the subject of philosophy to high schools in 1809, originally to train administrators, explained Bruno Poucet, an expert on the history of education in France and a professor emeritus at the University of Picardy Jules Verne in Amiens. But in the 1880s, the course took on a different purpose as the country re-established a democratic government after years of being ruled by an emperor.