Morin Against the Machines

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy," wrote Camus. One must imagine the teacher happy, we might add, which today belongs to pure fiction.

The Great Educational Lie

We live in a fascinating era. An era where we claim to form the citizens of tomorrow in establishments designed as 19th-century barracks, where we teach critical thinking by prohibiting any questioning of the system, where we proclaim equality of opportunity while meticulously reproducing social hierarchies. Hypocrisy has reached such a degree of refinement that it becomes almost artistic.

Edgar Morin, this old sage of 102 years who had the indecency to outlive all his contemporaries, has been offering us for decades a disturbing reading grid of this educational comedy. His "complex thought" — an expression that immediately makes Education national managers flee, allergic to anything that cannot be summed up in three PowerPoint bullet points — reveals the extent of the disaster.

For it is indeed a disaster. We have accomplished this feat: creating an education system that discourages learning, an institution of knowledge that cultivates ignorance, a republican school that manufactures inequality with the regularity of an assembly line. Hats off.

The Factory of Conformists

Let us observe this educational machine coldly. From 8:30 a.m., millions of children are corralled into classrooms, distributed by age brackets like yogurts in a supermarket. For six hours, they will ingest "knowledge" cut into 55-minute slices, moving from the Pythagorean theorem to the Hundred Years' War, from chemical transformations to grammatical analysis, in a hallucinating succession of micro-sequences with no relation to one another.

This fragmentation of knowledge is not accidental. It is programmed. It produces fragmented minds, incapable of grasping the complexity of reality, perfectly adapted to a working world itself fragmented where each person must execute their small task without ever understanding the whole. Intellectual Fordism, in a way.

Morin calls this the "pathology of knowledge." I call it Ikea-kit intelligence: prefabricated elements assembled according to an instruction manual, without ever understanding the overall logic, and which invariably end up collapsing at the first gust of wind.

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Modern School

When Morin enumerates his "seven knowledges necessary for the education of the future," he implicitly draws up an implacable indictment of today's school. Each of these knowledges reveals by contrast a major failing of our system.

First knowledge: recognizing one's errors and illusions. School teaches exactly the opposite: it cultivates the illusion of objectivity, the pretension to absolute truth. School textbooks are written in that administrative prose that presents the most debatable interpretations as established facts. History becomes a succession of dates and "great men," literature a catalogue of "beauties" to be admired without discussion, science a collection of eternal laws. Result: generations of students incapable of doubting, ideal prey for all purveyors of illusions.

Second knowledge: developing relevant knowledge. Relevant, really? When we teach photosynthesis without ever mentioning global warming, the French Revolution without explaining contemporary inequalities, economics without mentioning tax havens? This school teaches everything and anything, except the essential: understanding the world in which we live.

Third knowledge: teaching the human condition. There, it is the masterpiece. We slice the human being into rounds: biology on one side, psychology on the other, sociology elsewhere, history in another drawer. As if man were not precisely this complex creature where everything intertwines, where the biological influences the social, where the individual determines the collective and vice versa. Result: individuals who understand themselves as decomposable machines, perfect consumers of psychotherapy and personal development.

The Robot Factory: A Perfect Strategy for Obsolescence

The most perverse thing about this educational machine is that it operates on the lie of personal fulfillment. "Reveal your talents," "Express your creativity," "Build your professional project": pedagogical newspeak rivals that of marketing in emptying words of their meaning.

For after all, what creativity are we talking about when every gesture is regulated, when programs are fixed to the millimeter, when standardized evaluation measures the conformity of answers? What fulfillment when school selects from the youngest age, sorts, guides, excludes with the coldness of an algorithm?

School claims to form citizens. It manufactures consumers. It claims to develop critical thinking. It produces docility. It proclaims equality of opportunity. It perpetuates privileges with an efficiency unmatched by the most rigid caste systems.

But the most ironic thing is that this school-factory of human robots turns out to be perfect preparation... for uselessness. For these flesh robots that we so meticulously format, these docile executors programmed to apply procedures, follow instructions and reproduce models, artificial intelligence is already replacing them at a staggering speed.

ChatGPT writes better than our high school graduates. Algorithms calculate faster than our engineers. AIs analyze data with more rigor than our analysts. And soon, they will diagnose better than our doctors, plead better than our lawyers, teach better than our teachers.

We spent a century transforming humans into machines. Machines are returning the favor by showing us how much we have become... replaceable. School succeeded so well in its standardization work that it rendered its own products obsolete. Hats off, really.

And the best part is that everyone knows it. Teachers know it, who see cohorts of demotivated, disconnected, resigned students file through their classrooms. Parents know it, who desperately seek the private school or the excellence stream that will allow their offspring to escape the massacre. Politicians know it, who multiply cosmetic reforms to mask their impotence.

The Antidote to Programmed Obsolescence

Faced with this observation, Morin proposes a Copernican revolution: moving from teaching complication to educating for complexity. Replacing the transmission of dead knowledge with training in living thought. Substituting the logic of performance with that of relevance.

And suddenly, this proposal takes on a dramatic dimension. For what Morin describes is precisely what artificial intelligence cannot do: think complexity, navigate ambiguity, create meaning from chaos, demonstrate empathy, intuition, imagination.

AI excels in binary logic, resolution of defined problems, optimization of known processes. But faced with the unexpected, the unprecedented, the irrational? Faced with ethical dilemmas, existential paradoxes, artistic creations? Faced with this specifically human capacity to link what seems impossible to link?

Morin involuntarily offers us the survival strategy of the species: form humans who remain irreplaceable because they think like humans, not like perfected machines.

Concretely? Teach history by showing how the past illuminates the present — and how each interpretation reveals as much about the interpreter as about the facts. Do geography by revealing planetary interdependencies — and the political choices they imply. Practice science by questioning their ethical and social implications — and their inscription in power relations. Learn languages to discover other ways of thinking the world — and relativize our own.

In short, give meaning back to learning by linking them to life, to contemporary issues, to students' experience. Develop this specifically human intelligence: the intelligence of connection, of context, of meaning.

A revolution? No, a matter of survival. For in a world where machines think increasingly well, those who think like machines become superfluous. Only those who will have learned to think... as humans will survive.

The Guardians of the Temple

Naturally, this perspective disturbs. It disturbs the bureaucrats of the Education nationale, who have built their careers on managing complication and have no desire to reconvert into thought. It disturbs school textbook publishers, who live comfortably off the fragmentation of knowledge. It disturbs bourgeois parents, who have long understood that school was a game whose codes had to be mastered rather than a place of learning.

It disturbs above all a society that needs predictable, docile, easily manipulable citizens. For minds trained in complexity, capable of linking phenomena, thinking for themselves, resisting simplifications, constitute a deadly danger for all established powers.

Hence this muted resistance, this massive inertia that greets any attempt at genuine reform. We will change programs, reorganize streams, modify evaluation modalities, multiply support devices. But we will never touch the essential: this conception of education as training, this vision of the student as passive receptacle, this Taylorist organization of knowledge.

The Absolute Urgency

Yet the urgency is here. And it no longer comes only from climate change, the explosion of inequalities or the rise of authoritarianisms. It comes from this brutal revelation: artificial intelligence shows us in real time how much our education system has failed.

For what does an average student leaving our universities do exactly? They compile information, organize it according to predefined schemes, apply standardized methods, produce formatted analyses. Exactly what ChatGPT does, better and faster.

Our management graduates follow decision protocols? AI applies them without fatigue or qualms. Our engineers solve complex equations? Algorithms calculate them without error. Our journalists write articles according to agreed formats? AI generates them in a few seconds.

School continues to format individuals for a world that no longer exists: the industrial world of the 20th century, with its certainties, its stable hierarchies, its linear careers. It prepares our children for jobs that will disappear, with skills that become obsolete, in a competitive spirit that becomes counterproductive in the face of machines.

This inadequacy is not an accident. It reveals the real function of school in our societies: not to prepare the future, but to perpetuate the present. Not to emancipate consciousnesses, but to format them. Not to develop collective intelligence, but to maintain individual privileges.

Except that now, machines format better than we do. They perpetuate the present with more efficiency. They maintain privileges with more discretion. Here we are beaten on our own terrain: that of standardization.

History Is Not Written

Fortunately, Morin reminds us of an essential truth: history is not written. Today's school is not a fatality, but a choice. And like every human choice, it can be questioned, contested, transformed.

All over the world, alternative educational experiences are emerging: democratic schools, cooperative pedagogies, project-based teaching, flipped classrooms. These innovations remain marginal, but they prove that something else is possible.

They prove above all that children, when given the opportunity, reveal themselves infinitely more intelligent, creative and responsible than our institutions suppose. They are capable of learning by themselves, cooperating spontaneously, getting enthusiastic about knowledge when it makes sense.

The problem is not the pupil. The problem is not even the teacher, often as much a prisoner of the system as his pupils. The problem is the system itself: this bureaucratic machinery that crushes good wills, discourages initiatives, punishes innovation.

Another Education or Obsolescence

In a few decades, our descendants will look upon our era with the same gaze we cast upon centuries of obscurantism. They will be amazed that a civilization capable of sending probes to Mars could have tolerated such an archaic, ineffective, destructive education system.

They will be amazed above all that we had in our hands all the intellectual tools necessary for this transformation — Morin's complex thought being only one example among others — and that we preferred to maintain the status quo out of pure intellectual laziness.

But perhaps they will be amazed even more by this: we created machines so intelligent that they revealed our own stupidity. Artificial intelligence was our pitiless mirror, showing us what we had become: predictable executors, reproducers of schemes, biological machines less performant than their electronic equivalents.

For that is what it is about: laziness. The laziness of thinking otherwise, the laziness of questioning our habits, the laziness of trusting collective intelligence rather than ready-made recipes. The laziness of remaining human.

Edgar Morin holds out a lifeline: the possibility of forming free, critical, creative, cooperative minds. Citizens of the world capable of facing uncertainty without sinking into fanaticism, navigating complexity without taking refuge in simplification. Irreplaceable humans because authentically human.

We can seize this lifeline. Or continue to drown in our educational mediocrity by persuading ourselves that we are preparing the future, while machines are already preparing ours.

The choice is ours. For now. For even this privilege — that of choosing our destiny — we risk soon delegating to algorithms more efficient than ourselves.

Edgar Morin is 102 years old. He will probably outlive us all. Which, when you think about it, is rather reassuring: at least someone will be there to testify to our blindness. Provided he is not replaced by an AI more performant in the art of disabused lucidity.

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