The French had been grappling with two questions this week.
Not whether or not President Trump would hurl insults and go away the Group of seven early or who the least-known participant within the World Cup is.
As an alternative, they had been asking: Can one be blissful when others aren’t? And, Do we now have management of our phrases?
The questions had been a part of this 12 months’s written take a look at in philosophy, taken at the very same time every year across the nation by greater than a half-million 17- and 18-year-olds. The scholars, who’ve spent all 12 months taking a required course in philosophy, should reply considered one of two questions, or dissect a philosophical tract. This 12 months, the tract got here from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1878 guide, “Human, All Too Human.”
College students have 4 hours to jot down their responses. The examination is such an necessary a part of French training that native information shops commit live-blogs to it, beside their rolling updates on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, and invite philosophers to debate their very own responses to the questions on the radio and tv and in newspapers.
“For me, the philosophy examination says every part about who we’re,” stated Édouard Geffray, France’s training minister. He was talking from the yard of a highschool he visited on Monday to crack open examination packages in entrance of tv cameras and move them out to college students, and in addition to supply some last-minute nonphilosophical recommendation about proofreading.
The examination, he stated, “truly says that we’re a rustic during which we now have chosen to place the examination of opposing views and debate on the coronary heart of training.”
Napoleon launched the topic of philosophy to excessive faculties in 1809, initially to coach directors, defined Bruno Poucet, an skilled on the historical past of training in France and a professor emeritus on the College of Picardy Jules Verne in Amiens.
However within the Eighties, the course took on a unique function because the nation re-established a democratic authorities after years of being dominated by an emperor. The brand new authorities labored to root out the Roman Catholic Church from faculties, Mr. Poucet stated.
“The Republic was breaking free, so it was going to depend on the Enlightenment to emancipate itself, intellectually and politically, from the load of the Catholic Church,” he stated.
All college students take the course of their remaining 12 months of highschool, aside from these in vocational packages, who prepare for jobs in areas like building or resort administration.
“Victor Hugo stated, ‘As an alternative of reducing off the heads, simply fill them up,’” stated Frédéric Worms, a thinker and the pinnacle of the nation’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure, paraphrasing a passage from Hugo’s novella, “Claude Gueux.”
At his establishment, the nation’s high college students are paid to review to turn out to be professors, scientists and, sure, philosophers. Alumni embrace Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
As a mirrored image of how necessary philosophy stays in France, Mr. Worms is considered one of many French philosophers who moonlight as radio hosts. Each week, he poses and solutions three philosophical questions on air.
Anne-Sophie Moreau, an editor of Philosophie Journal, stated the philosophy course and examination had been a ceremony of passage for the French, just like army service in different international locations.
“It’s the concept it’s a must to undergo this collective reflection on values — on justice, on freedom, on what’s a state, on democracy — to turn out to be a great citizen,” stated Ms. Moreau, who’s recurrently employed by corporations to guide seminars with their employees on subjects like moral investments and employee engagement by a philosophical lens.
So what’s a typical French philosophy class like? I visited Nicolas Franck’s class in a public highschool in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a leafy Parisian suburb, to seek out out.
Mr. Franck is the previous president of the French philosophy lecturers’ union and has taught the topic for 35 years. The day I visited, his college students grappled with the query “Why can we work?” He sat on a desk on the entrance and went by the responses that college students had supplied.
“If it’s simply to make a residing, why do folks earn greater than they want?” he requested, reacting to 1 response. “There needs to be one thing else at play.”
Work is considered one of 17 interwoven ideas which can be the pillars of the course’s curriculum. Others embrace freedom, justice, reality, language and happiness. Lecturers can design their programs as they see match, dipping into an enormous checklist of philosophers alongside the way in which.
Later, he defined that the purpose of the course was not simply to be taught historic philosophical theories.
“What counts most,” he stated, “is a person’s capability to grasp and grasp concepts.”
Over two hours, Mr. Franck and his college students explored completely different views about work, from the Seventeenth-century French thinker Blaise Pascal’s view that it shaped a distraction from considering our personal mortality, to Karl Marx’s idea that by work, people remodel uncooked supplies and their inside selves on the similar time.
He instructed the scholars that their “convictions and biases” shaped his uncooked materials and that by educating them, he was “reworking” them. “That’s the work I’m doing now,” he stated.
One in all Mr. Franck’s college students, Raphaël Bakouch, stated his trainer was succeeding. The category, he stated, had “fully modified how I understand the world.” Issues he took as self-evident had turn out to be way more sophisticated. He stated he was hounded by the query of “who am I?”
“My mother and father named me, and I inherited my household identify,” Mr. Bakouch, 17, stated. “Finally, the one factor that really represents us and varieties our true identification is our work — what we do, what we create.” He stated he liked how the ideas all overlapped.
The philosophy course is extensively thought-about probably the most troublesome of a pupil’s remaining 12 months. The typical grade in 2025 was 10.8 out of 20, 2.3 factors under the final grade level common.
The day of the examination, many across the nation reminisced — typically ruefully — about their very own expertise.
“For me, it was an unbelievable revelation,” Mr. Geffray, the training minister, stated. His press secretary mumbled that he had been “hopeless” within the class and graduated with simply an eight. The police officer exterior stated she had additionally failed the examination, which is why she went into policing.
“The grade is taken very personally,” Mr. Worms stated. “It evaluates you for interested by life’s deepest questions.” When he tells cabdrivers his career, they invariably share what mark they acquired within the class, he stated.
“In case you are not capable of clarify the which means of life, who’re you?”
