Banal story of a day spent on the benches of the university. On the menu: “zoopoetics” and “eco-literature” criticism of “Western, white, heterosexual and patriarchal” literature… Faced with the interest shown by your child, you refrain from smiling for fear of being qualified of “old reaction” (in any case, you have no say in the matter since you “burned his planet”). You had put up with the “iel” to the place of the baker (who may be a baker despite the fact that he calls himself “Monsieur”) and the “point e point s” with each SMS. But when he supports you, following a reading whose reference escapes you, that there is a “steak patriarchy” (strongly challenged theory according to which the difference in height between men and women is due to a deprivation of meat inflicted on them from the Paleolithic), it is the deathblow. How did your child come to this (and you with it) and how do you react?
These are the questions that promises to answer the Small manual for parents of a woke child (Cerf) by Xavier-Laurent Salvador, lecturer in Old French and co-founder of the Observatory of Decolonialism. Not without humour, the author tackles each of the themes dear to the “wokist movement”. The list is long: language, spelling, grammar, geography, history, exact sciences, biology, literature, racism, anti-racism and racialism, feminism, Islamophobia, patriarchy, majority and minority… The guarantee of the liveliest family meals.
To this youth who have become defenders of the cause of points, sacrificing spelling and grammar on the altar of “inclusion”, Xavier-Laurent Salvador recommends responding with a brief historical reminder of what Puritanism was… The Republic promised to put an end to the clericalisms which advocated a moralizing rigorism, the “woke movement” has made a comeback. “Everyone is called upon to declare their practice, their kind of heart, their gender identity and finds themselves asked to stay there without ever moving, he notes. So, ultimately, who makes reality invisible? the neutral while knowing full well what he hears or the one who claims, against all scientific study, that the biology of chromosomes has nothing to do with real identity?
And if by chance, your child continues on his way, Xavier-Laurent Salvador offers an “exercise”, posed in the form of a problem: “Let’s admit that by checking spelling, we change people without their knowledge. If we prohibit people to say ‘racism’, do we eliminate racism? If we abstract the word ‘hate’ from the dictionary, do we eliminate the haters?”
Another theme conducive to generational conflicts: the rewriting of history. Your child has just discovered that a statue of Napoleon has finally made its grand return to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in Rouen, despite the lively controversy aroused by its presence. Stunned by this “micro-aggression”, he even takes up the words of Elisabeth Moreno, former minister in charge of gender equality who had described the emperor as “one of the greatest misogynists” in history. To correct these historical errors, your offspring therefore suggests “removing” said monument. Faced with this suppressive momentum, an act of “cancel culture” with a decolonizing vocation, the author recommends answering with the following question: “Displace the past in the present and the present in the past in order to instrumentalize them and bend them to a unavowable cause, isn’t this precisely the definition of revisionism? Here you are ready to react during the next unbolting.
The most optimistic will perhaps identify in these protesting inclinations the stigmata of a youthful romanticism, at most the awkward beginnings of a political awakening… With one (crucial) nuance. “We have never seen this romanticism validated, structured and financed by the adult world”, assures Xavier-Laurent Salvador.
The author is very critical of the “European institutions ready to finance the penetration of the woke ideology in our universities, by subsidizing research posts likely to disseminate certain studies“. Not to mention the lack of quality control of some academic papers.
“Small resignations” which would be at the origin of the flowering of these new course titles that your child is telling you about. Thus “human ecology”, considered as the only way “to change the world through benevolence” or even the “geography of the body”. On this theme, the author prescribes asking the following question: “if the body is a territory to be explored, can we consider that medicine is an urbanism?”
In reality, the emergence of these new classes is indicative of the growing confusion between “knowledge” (such as mathematics, supposed to be taught at university) and “techniques”, which was thought to be resolved in most modern societies. . However, Canada has reintroduced “indigenous knowledge” into its university courses, with the aim of “enriching local institutions with the ancestral science acquired by colonized populations”. Problematic, according to the author, “because no international council of indigenous knowledge will ever be able to validate the scientificity, the methodology or the quality of the work produced”.
Xavier-Laurent Salvador does not deny the interest of certain “techniques”. However, he calls for them to be distinguished from “knowledge” likely to be the subject of university education. To be heard, the teacher does not hesitate to take the astonishing example of magic (another argument to oppose to your child if the debate were to get bogged down). The latter is not taught at the university, although medicine in the modern sense of the term was born in its continuity, based on the treatises of alchemists and herbalists. But if this technique was no longer taught, it was precisely because the university had “know how to extract the quintessence to transform it into an object of knowledge”, explains the professor, also author of Magic and wonder in the Middle Ages and their symbolic significance. In the same way that astronomy developed against astrology, zoology against teratology, and of course mathematics against numerology…
To reaffirm the place of “knowledge” at the university, Xavier-Laurent Salvador does not rely only on parents, but also calls for the university to regain its role of disseminating universal knowledge. Otherwise what is limited today to “keyboard activism” could well become a major issue for our democracies.
