Why do we lose interest in something? Usually because we don't understand it, we're not connected to it, or we don't find it useful or satisfying. Which leads to the conclusion that the subject doesn't deserve our attention. Disinterest manifests itself concretely in a refusal to relate. "I don't want to know anything about ..." is quite explicit.
How many students have reached this point when it comes to certain subjects on the syllabus? After graduating, they lose interest in anything resembling an academic approach to the sciences, languages or even the arts. Solfeggio? Differential calculus? Botany? Latin? Anyone for whom the subject has been a source of intense stress or consummate boredom knows full well where they stand. But then, isn't there any way of re-establishing rapport?
In principle, the school facilitates the process of learning. One of its primary functions is to initiate, to show, to help discover. Humans learn through observation, perception, sensation, measurement and comparison, as well as through practice, discussion, reflection and analysis... through the pedagogical activities that schools can offer. If it does, there's no reason to formalize a certain lack of interest, because no one can be interested in everything with the same intensity. Everyone has their own priorities. This should be reflected in evaluations.
The omnipresence of the Internet undeniably facilitates access to knowledge, but only in a virtual and fragmented way. Coming to grips with the coherence and roughness of reality becomes a need that stems from recourse to the Internet. If the phenomenon of the bookworm was marginal before the Internet, the phenomenon of the Internet-anxious is by no means so. A clear role for schools is to bring concrete reality to students without distorting it: physical, cultural and social reality, with its imperfections and frustrations. Getting young people to face up to and develop their individual and collective capacities is the best way to dissolve anxieties. What we're talking about here is a pedagogical relationship that needs to be renewed.
Dynamic institutions don't wait for ministries to direct their activities; rather, they direct ministries.
Denys Lamontagne - [email protected]
