Simone Weil on education
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, activist, teacher, factory and agricultural worker who died in Ashford, Kent in 1943 at the age of 34. Her story is tragic in many ways, not least because she resisted baptism even though she had become convinced of the claims of Christ on her life. She was in some ways like a youthful Augustine (before he became St Augustine of Hippo): passionately searching for the truth, she passed through many different philosophies as the great angler slowly reeled her in.
In this post I want to look briefly at her views of education, which are extremely powerful. Let’s start with the memories of Anne Reynaud-Guérithault, who was 17 when Weil taught her:
She taught me at the girls’ secondary school at Roanne during the school year 1933-4. Our class was a small one and had a family atmosphere about it: housed apart from the main school buildings, in a little summer house almost lost in the school grounds, we made our first acquaintance with great thoughts in an atmosphere of complete independence. When the weather was good we had our lessons under the shade of a fine cedar tree, and sometimes they became a search for the solution to a problem in geometry, or a friendly conversation.
I could waste time by reminiscing at some length about some strange rows that took place: the headmistress coming to look for marks and positions which Simone Weil usually refused to give: our orders to rub out the platonic inscription we had written above our classroom door: ‘No one admitted unless he knows geometry’…. One must aim higher than that. Long before she became famous, I had carefully kept all my notes of her lessons. Simone Weil was too straightforward, too honest to ‘cram us for exams’ in lessons and keep her real thinking for other times.
I love that! Weil’s emphasis on small being beautiful, the family atmosphere of her classes, her love of outdoor education, her refusal to give marks or class positions to the headmistress, the refusal to cram students for exams: all these things can inspire us today.
But what about Weil herself? What did she write about education?
Many of her writings take the form of pensées. She doesn’t give us pat answers but allows us to think. Take this example, which I have been giving my students this week:
The only serious aim of schoolwork is to train the attention.
It probably helps to know that attention was quite different from concentration in Weil’s thought. Attention, as she understood it, was a radical receptivity to truth. She once wrote that:
No matter what effort we make, we cannot acquire for ourselves the good which is not in us. We can only receive it.
We can receive it without the slightest doubt, on just one condition. That condition is desire. But not desire for a partial good.
Only the desire which is focused directly upon pure, perfect, total and absolute good can produce in the soul more good than was there before. When a soul is in this state of desire, its progress is proportional to the intensity of the desire and to the pressures of time.
That’s why she claimed that, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” It’s also why she wrote that, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
In her attitude towards receptivity of truth, she has a lot in common with the Josef Pieper of Leisure the Basis of Culture and in her emphasis on the need for total attention, she reminds me of C. S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory in which Lewis wrote that:
if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
The problem, as Weil understood it (and as many authors from Matthew Crawford to Nicholas Carr in our own day have shown), is that we tend to give our attention to things, people and God in a very half-hearted way, a problem made worse by the industrial tendencies of the age:
The inferior kind of attention required by taylorized (conveyor-belt) work is incompatible with any other kind of attention since it drains the soul of all save a preoccupation with speed.
This inability to give our attention wholly to what really matters is, therefore, bound to have a major impact on education.
All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style and all faulty connection of ideas … all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth. The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search.
So what’s the answer to this major difficulty?
One possibility is that we simply slow down (as I have suggested elsewhere when writing about slow education. See too this article and this book.)
Another important part of the answer is given by Weil when she makes this provocative statement: “Workers need poetry more than bread.”
Really? Can that possibly be true?
Here’s how she develops that idea: “They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry. It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people. Deprivation of this poetry explains all forms of demoralization.”
When writing in this way, Weil sounds quite like Victor Frankl, another great Jewish thinker of the 20th century, when he argued (based on his experiences as a psychologist imprisoned in Auschwitz) for the central importance of meaning in people’s existence.
Another of Weil’s suggestions is that we address the fragmented nature of modern education: “My pupils, like most other pupils,” she wrote, “regarded the various sciences as compilations of cut-and-dried knowledge, arranged in the manner indicated by the textbooks. They had no idea either of the connection between the sciences or of the methods by which they were created.
I explained to them that the sciences were not ready-made knowledge set forth in textbooks for the use of the ignorant, but knowledge acquired in the course of ages by men who employed methods entirely different from those used to expound them in textbooks…. I gave them a rapid sketch of the development of mathematics [what she calls later in the letter, “the historical method of teaching science”] …They said it was the only method which could make pupils see science as something human, instead of a kind of dogma which you have to believe without ever knowing why.
So, in summary and drawing on the ideas of Simone Weil, we could do a lot worse than aim for these goals in education today:
· Human-scale educational settings
· A family atmosphere in classes
· Education outdoors whenever possible
· No cramming for exams
· Time to give attention to what really matters
· Time to focus on connections between ideas
· Education with beauty and purpose
Oh yes, and a little summer house almost lost in the school grounds would be quite pleasant too!
If you’re looking for more to read, why not have a look at my recent article on how the Professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is like a church? You can find it over at Into the Wardrobe and Beyond.