This curious way of working earns them occasional or repeated academic failures. This may lead to a loss of equilibrium in regards to the milieu that surrounds them.
At the age of sixteen, the mathematician Evariste Galois was failed at the entrance examination to the Polytechnic: he had insulted the examiner because the questions he had been asked were ‘too simple’.
In terms of character, creative people are nonconformists, with all that it this entails for brilliance, charm, but also fragility. Uneasy, even anxious, and tending to live alone, they are prone to ‘affectionate’ yet dangerous indulgences in everything that departs from the norm and which feeds the fantasies of their vivid imaginations. ‘Revolutionaries’ of heart and vulnerable in soul, they also tend to become easily crestfallen.
‘The characteristic traits of the gifted’, writes Chauvin, ‘are the same everywhere: anxiety, insecurity, a feeling of isolation, an incessant desire to read, a preference for self-direction, etc.’.
Among the gifted of the ‘classical’ kind, the difficulties are of a different order. At six, a child with an IQ of 180 has an intellectual level of eleven years. At ten or eleven years, he is at the level of an ‘average’ student. In relation to his acquaintances, this is translated by a feeling of rupture.
Mr. Chauvin goes so far as to say: ‘the stronger the IQ, the more severe the problems of social adjustment, and the more serious the persecutions at school’.
The result: according to a survey by Ralph Goldberg and Passow carried out in 1966, about 40 of the gifted (54% of boys and 33% of girls) have grades so bad from high school that they cannot enter into higher education. And their failures only multiply once they reach adulthood.
Throughout their existence, many will still be victims of what Pierre Viansson-Ponté called ‘democratic egalitarianism’.
Potential Aptitudes
Chauvin relates: ‘In a large number of American establishments, the teachers have claimed that they do not have any particularly gifted children in their class, which is obviously impossible. Either the problem did not interest them, or they were under the influence of an absurd democratic prejudice’.
Once again it is the dispute between heredity and environment. Both factors must be taken into consideration. But heredity is given first. Then the environment exerts its influence. Genetics has primacy.
Numerous ideologues claim, however, that all men are equal and mouldable at will. ‘One recognises here’, observes Chauvin, ‘a theory of Marxist inspiration. But if we leave metaphysics aside and confine ourselves to facts, they lead us to a different opinion’. He adds: ‘Elitism exists even in nature’.
However, it should not be forgotten that aptitudes, even hereditary ones, are only potentials. If no opportunity is given for them to be expressed, they atrophy, like a muscle that is no longer used. ‘It is a grave mistake’, says Victor Serebriakoff, ‘to believe that in gifted children, “genius” is automatically expressed. In order to express themselves properly, the gifted require an appropriately favourable environment. Whence the need for detection, selection, and constant and sustained assistance’.
In passing, Rémy Chauvin dispels several other misconceptions. He points out, for example, that strong intellectual quotients are recruited in all environments, even if the least favoured social classes are also those with the highest proportion of below average IQs — in the highest social classes, the chances for an individual to be gifted at birth with a higher IQ are greater.
An explanation: the genetic law of ‘regression to the mean’, which ensures the circulation of the elites. And the fact that the ‘middle’ or disadvantaged classes are also the most numerous. (One gifted child is born for every 10,000 people.)
Contrary to a relatively widespread idea, it is inaccurate for gifted children to be generally physically ill. According to a Terman survey carried out over forty years among 1,528 people of different races and backgrounds, all with an IQ above 150, their physical characteristics are almost always above average. In early childhood, they learn walking and speech earlier. From this point of view, there is a certain psychosomatic solidarity.
Likewise, prodigious calculators are, furthermore, not necessarily dumb. The mathematician Henri Poincaré (La science et hypothèse) made all his calculations in his head. Gauss, at three years old, carried out complex operations. Ampere did the same at four, with beans and pebbles.
Chauvin also suggests that gifted children inform us of the meaning of evolution, which continues not at the level of volume but of the structural functioning of the brain.
‘Are higher intelligences’, he writes, ‘really only the end of the classical Gauss curve, or are they something else?’ And what would happen if the Gauss curve shifted over the centuries to the great intelligences? In any case, when we speak of the possible paths of man’s future evolution, I firmly believe we overlook a major one. This way is shown to us by gifted children, even though they are not conscious of it themselves.
To avoid the ‘waste of grey matter’, two methods exist: accelerated study, which allows the most gifted to ‘jump’ classes or to do two classes in a single year; and regrouping, which gathers the gifted under the wing of specialised teachers.
A Program for Detection and Information
Chauvin is quite supportive of the second formula. But he emphasises that there is a great difference between what could be an education for the gifted, and different schools of a ‘higher level’ which currently exist, which are primarily centres of forcing. He therefore proposes the development of a genuine ‘detection’ and information program.
This raises the problem of training the teachers. It also poses the problem of the dominant ideology: as long as l’Education nationale continues to regard it as an article of faith that ‘gifts do not exist’, gifted children will be condemned. And society, which helps to perfect children who are gifted at skiing, tennis, or swimming, will continue to do nothing in the field of intelligence and creativity.
In the Revue des deux-mondes (November 1968), a Professor at the Sorbonne thus characterised the reforms of higher education introduced by the general law and simultaneously adopted by Parliament: ‘The guiding idea that inspires these reforms is that all children are gifted by nature of an equal intelligence and that all also have the appeal to undertake higher studies’.
In the Soviet Union, where since July 1936 the use of intelligence tests has been forbidden, mathematicians organise a lecture every year aimed at recruiting the most brilliant minds. In France, in the spring of 1972, Mensa tried to open a school for the gifted in the Nice area. They had to give it up for failure to obtain the necessary authorisations.
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Les surdoés, by Rémy Chauvin.533 Stock, 216 pages.
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The first International Conference on Gifted Children was held in London in September 1975. At the end of the proceedings, four hundred specialists from fifty-five countries were able to compare their points of view, and an international council was established. Its presidency was entrusted to Dan Bitan, who is responsible for gifted children in the Israeli Ministry for National Education.
In the United States, a Council for Exceptional Children (Box 6034, MidCity Station, Washington DC, 20005), attached to the National Education Association, was established in the aftermath of the war. It publishes the journal Exceptional Children. In France, there is a National Association for Gifted Children (ANPES)534 headquartered in Nice and chaired by Jean-Claude Terrassier.
The University Plagued by Beasts
National education is a great whale stranded on the shore of the world, devoured by small beasts. ‘Yes’, writes Roger Ikor, ‘the great beast is prey to beasts, but first to the biggest of all, which is itself’.
‘That things have been denied in the university’, he continues, ‘no one doubts, even, and above all, those whose profession it is to pretend that they are doing well. What things? But all, parbleu! Or almost’.
Roge
r Ikor, sixty-five years of age, an Agrégé of Literature,535 Assistant Professor at the Sorbonne, has been teaching since 1937. As a novelist, he received the Goncourt Prize in 1955 (for Les eaux mêlées).536 Politically he is quite socialist.
‘Psychoanalytic Purgation’
His book, L’école et la culture, is subtitled L’université proie aux bêtes.537 It bears the following dedication: ‘To my effectively practicing colleagues, to avenge the pedagogues who do not practice’. It provides a means of opposing abstractions and chimeras with concrete reality.
The French university, claims Ikor, has become a field of experiments for uninspired pedagogues. This is the domain of Father Ubu. Clochemerle plus Kafka.
‘The standard procedure’, he explains, ‘consists in: (1) multiplying the experiments, which amounts to willingly sacrificing a number of children used as guinea pigs; (2) making two steps forward in the chosen direction; (3) then a crab step half back; (4) then a small, timid mini-reform; (5) which will soon be replaced by another; (6) then … I abbreviate: after ten years, twenty years, the landscape, by callous swipes, is thus transformed’.
An example: a well-meaning spirit once thought that numerical grading was ‘traumatic’ because it encouraged emulation (hence bringing out the best) and gave ‘complexes’ to those who received bad marks. The scale of 0 to 20 has thus been replaced by five ‘levels’: A, B, C, D, E. ‘The system was tremendously revolutionary: it has been practiced for many years in the capitalist United States! And it was also used, I believe, by the Jesuits in the nineteenth century’.
After this, because the ‘levels’ lacked precision, they were usually given a ‘plus’ sign or a ‘minus’ sign.
‘Five times three makes fifteen, and the end result is a slight shortening of the 0 to 20 old scale. Only by a little, because 20 and 19 were actually quite rare, as were 0 and 1. And thus an important verbal revolution is realised!’.
Another example: ‘free expression’. This was the subject of the commission for the reform of French teaching, chaired by Pierre Emmanuel. Ikor resigned in order to express his disagreement with the so-called theories of ‘creativity’, which he sees as a ‘psychoanalytic purgation’.
‘The child expresses himself’? he writes. ‘By god, yes: like a lemon! The juice, moreover, is succulent for the adult who tastes it: like surrealist poetry still fresh to the mind! I, myself, affirm that it is a criminal violation to the integrity of the child’s soul, that is, to its very freedom. The fact that violation is perpetrated without violence does not change the fact that it is a true misappropriation of the minor’.
The result: ‘In a society which demands beings that are conditioned to its functions, the University will deliver goods to those who are good for nothing, who know nothing but farfetched specialties, while having everything to learn, beginning with spelling and the mathematical rule of three’.
A disillusioned reflection: ‘It is better for an educated person to be taught well by a backward or perhaps ‘conservative’ teacher, than to be educated badly by a perfect or even ‘revolutionary’ teacher.
For behind the dance of reforms and continuous experimentation, there are fashionable ideologies and ‘new educators’.
‘I have always been seized with terror’, writes Ikor, ‘before these saints, these inflexible inquisitors, who never raise their voices, who constantly carry an unchanging smile upon their faces, bathed in certainty, who never seem to have the demeanor of order-givers, but who are blissfully obeyed … Today, certain ‘advanced’ reformers strongly remind me of these men’.
The credo of ‘cultural and social paedogogicomania’ begins with the refusal of selection. Of the pupils as of the teachers. Some educators (like the scholastics that were replete throughout the Middle Ages, says Ikor) find it quite normal that the society which employs them considers them perfect.
‘If we listen to them, anyone would have the right to teach anything in any way without having to account to anyone, and they wouldn’t need academic titles (the hide of an ass, how revolting!) — and the first man who came along would seize the children and manipulate them as he pleased, simly because it is his personal vocation! If this is not delivering the University to the beasts, then what is it?’
‘Now, whatever way one takes things, education remains a matter of authority. (Obedience is correlative of command). ‘Since the education of the young is inscribed in animal reality, it obeys deep laws which, originally, depend on our bodies and belong to our biology. From such laws, which are natural, we cannot escape’.
In short, education is a ‘dressage’.
‘What I dare to put forward here is not very fashionable. The word dressage shocks those who are delicate. Too bad! It says exactly what it means: that the human being walks upright’.538
Previously, French mothers said to their offspring: ‘Don’t touch the matches, you’ll burn yourself’. The young Englishman, however, was left to himself: ‘You want to play with matches? Play! When you burn yourself, you will understand! (On one hand, it was theory, on the other, practice). Today we give matches to the child. Then he is consoled without explaining why he was burned.
The Misdeeds of the Core Curriculum
Roger Ikor, who remains suspicious of the notion of the elite, considers that ‘gigantism of the university is irreversible’. He quotes, however, the words of Montaigne: ‘When men are assembled, their heads shrink’.
This is because the spirit does not like the masses.
Between a class of twenty-five pupils and a class of fifty, there is not simply a difference of degree: ‘It is impossible to know with precision at what moment a gathering of grains becomes a pile. Nevertheless, from a certain moment, the pile exists as such and is worked with a shovel, or even a digger. The same goes with school’.
Ikor also denounces the misdeeds of the ‘core curriculum’. We know the principle: in middle school,539 everyone receives the same teaching. Having become state law, the ‘core curriculum’ reigns over the whole cycle of compulsory schooling. And yet, ‘it is difficult to see how the same mould could receive a future Einstein or a future Diafoirus at fifteen years of age without disaster’.
This is the trend that dominates. The ‘social situation’ is supposed to take the place of intelligence and give rise to higher education. In a ‘homogeneous’ education system, everyone can be rendered intelligent. Here we find the egalitarian postulate.
The latter proceeds from ‘two rival philosophies, which, despite opposing premises, culminated, in matters of instruction, in the same conclusions. It is a matter of French Cartesianism and English empiricism: the Cartesians consider reason to be identical in all men, the empiricists maintain that mind is a tabula rasa at birth, offering the same opportunities for development in all children’ (Louis Rougier, L’égalité dans l’éducation, in Le Spectacle du monde, March 1969).540
On the first page of the Discourse on Method, Descartes, a former pupil of the Jesuits, declares, ‘Good sense or reason is naturally equal in all men’. Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, writes in his Logic: ‘To be a man is equally suited to the wisest and the most foolish, without ever being able to say, speaking properly and exactly, that one man is more man than another’.
From the empiricism of the ‘clean slate’, which sees the newborn’s mind as a ‘sheet of white paper’ (according to Locke’s expression), Helvetius asserts that ‘spirit, genius, and virtue are the product of instruction’, such that from the smallest shepherd of the Alps, a Newton or Lycurgus can be drawn at will’ (De l’esprit).
Ikor responds: ‘The best of us are blind to this deplorable but incontestable reality that men are unequal in strength, quality, and value. Or rather their intelligence knows, but their heart, content, speaks louder. The conclusion: ‘To each according to his quality, his value, his strength. To restrain the most gifted is as unjust as restraining the least gifted’.
Ikor, finally, speaks at length about the reform of French. He particul
arly denounces the method which replaces, under the guise of ‘simplification’ (as usual, the less gifted should not be given ‘complexes’), the study of the literary work (considered a masterpiece, thus made by an elite), with that of the ‘text’, and more specifically the ‘non-literary text’: a popular song, a ‘fashionable’ poster or advertising flyer, etc., made by the masses — in short, to substitute the ‘French which we speak’ (basic French) with the French we have to speak.
‘How can you say’, he asked, ‘that a thought can be sharply formulated unless it has rubbed against good models?’
If the University is to stop being plagued by beasts, it must be restored to men. And preferably to sensible men. This is obvious, of course. ‘But would de La Palice not be the greatest revolutionary mankind has ever produced?’
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L’école et la culture, by Roger Ikor. Castermann, 139 pages.
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At the beginning of 1976, a Study Group for a New Education (GENE)541 was created that proposed to develop a global education project as an integral part of the conception of the world and life. GENE, which claims to situate itself ‘beyond the sterilising past of certain traditional pedagogy like derealising the utopianism of certain conformist pedagogy’, wishes to gather around it all those who, by the fact of their competences or their functions (professors, teachers, psychologists, doctors, parents of pupils, etc.), are concerned about the problems of education. It publishes the journal Nouvel éducation (130 rue de la Pompe, 75116 Paris).
Other Books published by Arktos
Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya
The Dharma Manifesto
Alain de Benoist
Beyond Human Rights
Carl Schmitt Today
The Indo-Europeans
Manifesto for a European Renaissance
On the Brink of the Abyss
The Problem of Democracy
Heritage and Foundations Page 43