Book review of Stéphane Louryan's book[1]
This book by Stéphane Louryan is, in a way, a sequel to his previous work. University autopsy, that we had commented on here under the pessimistic title "The Announced Death of the Belgian University", he brings us here his reflections and proposals on pedagogy in higher education – reflections and proposals which also apply in part to secondary education, on which the author has also worked.
Stéphane Louryan taught morphological sciences at the Faculty of Medicine of the Free University of Brussels and shares with us his 40 years of experience training future doctors. While his description of the pedagogical shortcomings he encountered during his long career is pessimistic, his keen identification of the root causes of these deficiencies and his suggestions for helping colleagues and students overcome them give us reason for hope.
In some twenty short and incisive chapters, the author paints an uncompromising yet dispassionate picture of a situation that has deteriorated significantly with the massive influx of students into a wide-open university system, without a corresponding recruitment of an adequate number of teachers genuinely trained in pedagogy. Instead, they learn on the job, without ever reflecting on what should be taught or how to teach it. "The epistemology of knowledge must play a major role in teacher training," the author rightly tells us.
The immediate causes of these educational deficiencies are multiple: lack of time and interest on the part of teachers, who know that they will be judged on their scientific publications and not on the quality of their teaching; lack of motivation on the part of students who prefer to pile up and regurgitate unrelated bodies of knowledge rather than embark on an in-depth learning process which is nevertheless essential to knowledge; lack of long-term vision on the part of the supervisory bodies for whom the "success rate" in exams is an objective in itself, independent of the actual quality of the students.
The consequences of these deficiencies are serious and will become apparent when these poorly trained students enter the workforce; however, in most careers, they will be able to learn through experience, quickly identify their shortcomings, and address them. But in the medical field, the consequences can be dramatic, as it is the patients who entrust their health, and often their lives, to them who will suffer the consequences.
By tracing the chain of causality that led to this state of affairs, Stéphane Louryan rightly blames the students' lack of general knowledge, particularly literary culture. The humanities are no longer part of the secondary school curriculum, critical source analysis never has been, and relativism has pervaded minds to such an extent that students come to "consider scientific truth […] as just another opinion."
A sharp analysis of certain interconnected scientific fields supports the author's reflections on complex thought and enriches the work: the "new history," in other words, the history of sensibilities initiated by Lucien Febvre and developed by Fernand Braudel; mathematics [2] The so-called "modern" approach, which opened the minds of 20th-century high school students to logic; thermodynamics and information theory; quantum mechanics, so perplexing, which reveals discontinuity where common sense sees only continuity; linguistics and general semantics—all sciences whose parallel evolution has considerably reshaped our approach to the complexity of reality. The author demonstrates how opening students up to disciplines other than their own would strengthen their understanding of the world and, in turn, enrich their relationship to knowledge.
Defining the terms multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity, Stéphane Louryan demonstrates the need to train students to handle complexity by creating a genuine preparatory course prior to their final integration into a specific field. He compares the situation in France and Belgium, where specialization occurs too early, to that of medieval universities, where the teaching of the "liberal arts" was a prerequisite for subsequent training in philosophy, theology, law, and medicine. Indeed, it is regrettable that, as the author puts it, "the universal and humanistic dimension of higher education is fading in the face of professional training."
I must truthfully say that reading this book, small in size but as rich in ideas as a 400-page book, greatly impressed me, made me want to go further and read a good part of the literature cited: I can only hope that its readers appreciate it as much as I did.
Stéphane Louryan will, I hope, allow me a bit of teasing: he attributes (p. 31) the etymology of the term "religion" to the meaning of " religious "To connect." Now, according to the great linguist Émile Benveniste, following an indication from Cicero, the term Religion does not come from Latin rĕligāreto attach, to bind (understood to mean men to God) but rĕlĕgĕre, to go back through reading, through thought, through speech, and by extension to repeat a rite, scrupulously.
