THE RESISTANTS OF THE SENSE

« What is a good teacher? » someone asks me. In this case, to think is to lie. Only one possible answer: Mr. Forget. 

It was at Louis-le-Grand, in hypokhâgne, where he taught French and Latin. If I say that I owe to this man a passion for literature, the burn of which his colleague from Première, M. Pignarre, had already made me feel, one will think that I am engaging in a sympathetic but rather conventional exercise. And when I evoke Mr. Forget reciting in a half-voice these three verses of Baudelaire which he put above all 

The servant with a big heart
that you were jealous of, 

And who sleeps his sleep under
a humble lawn, 

We should however
carry some flowers. 

similar memories will rise in the heart of the reader before he turns with a little sadness this page of nostalgia. 

It will be my fault: I will not have said anything. It will be my fault: I will have hidden in the folds of an aesthetic emotion something much stronger than it. It will be my fault: I will have reduced the category of the Beautiful — with the True and the Good, one of the three transcendentals — to a subaltern status of vibration that one picks for pleasure, and that, of anger, fades. 

Mr. Forget did much more than provide me with a supply of dreams. He helped me to place my thoughts like a singing teacher places the voice of his student. My thought? My life rather, which was not self-evident. Or, even better, my desire, my way of looking at the world. 

I was the only poor one in this class of young bourgeois, the jewel of this noble high school. I was still living in the HBM of Montrouge where I was born. I say HBM, habitation à bon marché: nothing to do with low-cost housing, or HLM, pure palaces in my childhood eyes. I would add that this HBM on rue de la Solidarité, which was called the Solo, was also Coluche’s. The ten years that separated us made us move in different circles, but we breathed the same air. 

I didn’t like my fellow students. Their seriousness seemed light to me. They were contemptuous by construction until some quality manifested itself in those they despised; then they became pitifully servile. 

Apart from my textbooks, there were only three books in our house, side by side in a nightstand: the Parables from the Gospel, Les lettres de mon moulin by Alphonse Daudet and a mismatched volume of L’Étape, by Paul Bourget, a novelist who had already been forgotten. That day, Mr. Forget had mentioned this text and had asked us if we knew its author. I raised my finger and he was surprised at my knowledge. « I found this book in my father’s library, sir, » I replied. It was a great moment. I can still see all those faces suddenly turned towards me, I can read in them the curiosity, the fear of having blundered by standing aside, and if I want to confirm my importance, the litter of respect that is preparing for me. I also see a slight smile on the teacher’s face. It will be the only flash of collusion between us, but it will be decisive. I feel Mr. Forget is as happy as I am to have a little fun with these youngsters. No malice in that, no resentment, no revenge. A simple tease, but behind it, a quiet, unwavering, unsinkable affirmation. 

Here, I am getting closer to what a real teacher is for me. Someone who, through an astonishing encounter between what he knows, what he is, what he loves, what he desires, meets in every way unique, neither imitated nor imitable, proposes to young minds a way of being, of thinking, of feeling that meets their secret requirements. 

My fellow students were suspicious of Mr. Forget and preferred more dull teachers. They didn’t particularly care for engineering. They wanted something square, useful, ready-to-understand, vitamin for the future competition, something nourishing for the ambition, something filling to succeed. They supervised their intake of knowledge as the breeder supervises the fattening of the cattle; in fact, as entrepreneurs of themselves, they were both the breeder and the animal. I remember how they had disconcerted me at the beginning of the year, these young traders in ideas: thanks to Paul Bourget, I was no longer afraid of them, the intimidation stage was over. 

The rest of the school year was a celebration. When I think of those moments of grace that were for me the courses of this professor, I find intact my jubilation and the energy that it infuses me. Others have known, almost as well as he did, how to show me the beauty of a text, the greatness of a thought. But Mr. Forget did much more. In his words, the Beautiful was more than the Beautiful, the aesthetic never folded on itself, everything echoed, everything was — as in Baudelaire — correspondence. 

He commented on Clément Marot. And first, he recited: 

Think of Death, think of the harm it does, 

Don’t sleep without thinking about the bad guy, 

Then when I wake up, count it all 

What have you thought, so that I sing it. 

And I found my life, life. In the same movement, I entered and left myself. I was being educated, I was being led elsewhere. I had a teacher. 

No, no, it was not in 1951. It’s today. Everything is merging in me. Everything I already knew about evil, the ugliness of Solo, the ugliness of ambition on the faces of my fellow students. Everything I’ve learned since then. But I will wake up and someone will sing. Everything is an allusion. 

To teach is to say hope 

Study loyalty

I didn’t live in memories. Not in the books. I lived among my fellow men, a little teacher, a long time trainer. Immersed, thanks to this strange profession, in the so-called real world, where secretaries and employees, workers and executives pretend to live. Often, in our conversations, we talked about school. And I could see where she had touched them. By none of the things we’re talking about today. By the miracle of a transmission that overflowed, and by far, what it had to transmit. By the link she had woven between their childhood and consciousness, between their childhood and care, between their childhood and their destiny. 

This link, in most cases, is now broken. An older man, when he looked back to his childhood, could recognize as his own what he had been taught. However learned he became, his science was a development of this first contribution. This will no longer be the case. The imbecilic competition, the cowardly pedagogical standardization in which untalented teachers imagine they can find a remedy for their inadequacy, the hysterical pressure of fashions, the retreat of freedom of thought and feeling, the obsession with efficiency, the tyranny of a moral pressure a hundred times less sensible and a thousand times more ferocious than that imposed by the most sinister denominational establishments of yesteryear, in a word, the thick, discouraging, greasy reign of what Simone Weil called « the big animal » and which today would be better named « the big asshole », delivers teaching to the worst contingency that exists, that of uselessness, that of vulgarity, that of war. The momentum of the beginning, where the best of the legacy lies, is what has been sabotaged. 

Let us reform what we want. As long as the imbecilic idea of « education as a vector of growth » continues to be imposed on gullible politicians by schizophrenic experts, we will only have to choose between the useless and the pernicious. The very people who proclaim this insanity know it, and would admit it if they were free people: nothing will be built on it. Nothing in Europe, that’s pretty clear. But don’t be fooled: nothing else either, hopes will drown very quickly. This is why, there as here, the Mr. Forget of today can only be absolute contradicts, something like objectors of thought, like resistors of meaning. 

Jean Sur

« Child! Make sure that one day you will be able to look at this summary of your school life without having to be ashamed of it! It is not necessary for you to be one of the first students in your class: the advantage of this booklet is precisely that it does not aim to compare you with your classmates, but to compare you successively with yourself. It is not a question of showing whether you are more intelligent, more skilful, more learned than this or that other pupil, but of showing each year, each month, whether you are more skilful and more learned than you were some time before, whether you have tried to be better today than yesterday, whether you will try to be even better tomorrow than today. Child! Consider this. One does not work for oneself alone in this world, one also works for others. If you have a moment of weakness and discouragement, as a child, do not let yourself be discouraged, and to regain your courage, say to yourself: I want to work, I want to become better, not only because it is in my interest, but because it is my duty. 

Text that appeared on the cover of the monthly homework book distributed to elementary school students in Paris in 1912