How can we understand the need for a “new pedagogy”? And what might its main features be? Both in *Petite Poucette*, published in 2012, and in *Le Tiers-Instruit*, an essay on education published in the 1990s, Michel Serres offers valuable insights into these questions that can inspire today’s teachers and parents.
“A certain chapter is coming to an end. Is a new one beginning?” (Le Tiers Instruit). For Michel Serres, every information revolution has been “invasive” for pedagogy. Indeed, he identifies three major shifts in the dual evolution of the life of knowledge and the resulting educational model. Each is marked by “hominescent transformations,” that is, by the emergence of a new kind of human: “Just as pedagogy was invented by the Greeks (paideia) at the time of the invention of writing, just as it was transformed when printing emerged during the Renaissance, so too is pedagogy changing completely with new technologies.” (Petite Poucette).
After having relied solely on the scholar—the “aede” or “griot”—as its sole medium, knowledge became objectified on parchment (the invention of writing: the first transformation), then in books (the printing press: the second transformation). Today, it is objectified everywhere and available on the Web (the Internet: the third transformation). In a world dominated by “connectivity,” people have access, at will, to knowledge that is now available to everyone: “Knowledge? There it is, all over the Web, available, objectified” (Petite Poucette).
What, then, will be the role of teachers? Haven’t the media long since taken over “the role of teaching” from them? This question is all the more pressing given that this “decisive change in education… is something we feel we urgently need, but we are still far from achieving it”! For the most part, “everything remains to be invented.”
According to Michel Serres, the hoped-for change will only come about if it occurs on two complementary levels: an educational level and an anthropological level, on which the former is based.
At the first level, breaking free from “outdated frameworks” is essential. Among the “unimaginable innovations” to be devised, we might mention moving beyond “the spatial format imposed by the book and the page”; giving widespread consideration to the “new demands” presented by learner audiences; the demise of the National Education System as a “major institution,” now a “dead star”; the end of the school where students sit passively (a “Cave” worthy of Plato); the disappearance of classrooms; the end of rankings; moving beyond the “religion” of “scientific” disciplines toward a “mosaic” that better reflects the “interconnected multiplicities” of our societies (Petite Poucette).
But whatever these “innovations” may be, what matters is knowing what will guide the actions of educators working within the “frameworks” devised to replace those that have been rendered obsolete. Serres’s guiding principle is to advocate for an activity-based pedagogy, which will enable teachers to bring forth an “educated third party.” This involves challenging learners so that they are compelled to take action and try new things.
To thwart is to go “against the grain”: “Do teachers realize that, in the fullest sense, they have taught only those whom they have thwarted—or rather, complemented?” (Le Tiers Instruit).
This is what the theme of the “thwarted left-hander” conveys. We must challenge every student to go beyond their limits, not limiting themselves to what comes most easily to them or to their most obvious abilities. To thwart, in order to bring forth the “third” in each person. For one needs the other to become fully one! And to do so, they must work hard, for “everything always comes from work.” “Learn and create without ceasing.”
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To compel, to challenge, to make one work: such a program does not, on the surface, seem to promote freedom. But in reality, compulsion is the prerequisite for liberation—through the self-enrichment of the “educated third party.”
The frustrated student will be compelled to move and to try. To move is to leave the library to “run in the open air” (Le Tiers Instruit). It is to “set sail from being-there” to give free rein to one’s “passion for travel.” It means accepting to be “exiled,” “forever outside any community, yet a little and very slightly within all of them.” It means taking the risk of chance and the unknown by exposing oneself. “For there is no learning without exposure—often dangerous—to others.”
The first risk—one we face the moment we try—is that of making a mistake. For just as wandering lies in wait for those who move, mistakes lie in wait for those who try. Nevertheless, “don’t just talk—do,” because “there is no human without experience”! The entire *Le Tiers-Instruit* is a tribute to “doing.” We must try, and always (first) with our hands: “Before teaching children how to use a console or keyboard, give them something to weave or knit.”
That is why we must always “try things out,” without fear of making mistakes: “To err is human. At least they tried.” It is from this perspective that “real practice” must become ubiquitous in the new educational “frameworks.” “Live, taste, set out, play, do—don’t copy. The real lie comes from shying away from trying.”
To break free from frameworks dating back to a bygone era and adapt to the mindset of the “new human” who “knows differently,” educators must therefore make it their central mission to contribute to the emergence of the “educated third.” This involves bringing together seemingly contradictory elements—which are, in fact, merely complementary—within the inclusive unity of a multifaceted individual.
Learning is a fusion of cultures: “All learning requires this journey with others and toward otherness” (Le Tiers-Instruit). The traveler lets go of his or her sense of belonging—or rather, frees himself or herself from its restrictive aspects—because “belonging is the root of the world’s evil, due to exclusion.” We must put an end to “the libido of belonging” (Petite Poucette), which has caused hundreds of millions of deaths.
“Born a Gascon, he remains one and becomes French—in fact, of mixed heritage; as a Frenchman, he travels and becomes Spanish…” “The person of mixed heritage, here, is called a ‘tiers-instruit’” (Le Tiers-Instruit). For Serres, the two terms are practically synonymous: “To learn: to become enriched by others and by oneself. Generation and cultural mixing.”
I become myself only through the contribution of the third party that I incorporate by becoming an “instructed third party.” I must pass through a “third point” to become, as a beautiful phrase puts it, “numerous enough.” In this way, everyone can complete their determinations, become “multiple,” to access the possible, and ultimately the universal, for “the universal nestles within the singular,” after it has been nourished by others. Thus may emerge, as a quality, the person of the “third subject,” “uniting the general and the particular.”
It is indeed the vision of a new human being—liberated because he is whole—that gives meaning to the pedagogy advocated here. No coherent pedagogy can exist without being rooted in anthropology, since it is a matter of “shaping… the human being of the future” (Le Tiers-Instruit). In this regard, Serres offers us an anthropology of restraint, for a human being endowed with a soul.
The third person who is born within us when we become an “educated third party” through cultural mixing is a human being endowed with a soul. This last term is essential for Serres. The soul refers to the “third space,” or “distance,” or “volume,” that develops between “being-there” (what is given to each of us before education) and what I have constructed in a manner “proportional” to my “exposure” to the world and to others. The soul is a reality constructed through experience. “Everyone, at least once in their life, experiences this tremendous expansion of being—in volume, explosive force, and potential—this free breeze: the infinite possibility of learning” (The Third-Educated).
Through learning, each person thus, in a certain sense, experiences divinity. But if the infinite possibility of learning gives human beings, through their souls, a divine dimension, it would be a fatal mistake for them to take themselves for a God who thereby possesses all rights: over nature (for only “nature is God”), over other living beings, and over other human beings! The new human being of the future will be even more subject than his predecessors to the obligation of restraint. He must resist the impulse of power. This is precisely what a pedagogy of “contrarian” constraint contributes to…
We must abandon the paranoid project of monopolizing the earth. Human beings must learn to be modest, to become humble, and to humble themselves. “Original sin” is thinking of oneself as a king whose triumph is assured and eternal. “The will to power… has never produced anything but human misery.” “Collective death” would immediately follow a conquering group’s victory over others. The triumph of “the same” leads to the death of the one who triumphs.
Yet, “Here we are, in turn, the last ones, at the height of our power, on the very brink of committing the error” (The Third-Educated). The immense duty of educators today is to contribute to the emergence of a human being—not one who reigns unchallenged, but one who exercises self-restraint. “Humanity becomes human when it invents weakness—which is profoundly positive.”
Ultimately, two major lessons emerge from Serres’s deeply insightful analyses. The first, of an anthropological nature, is that education has an undeniable moral dimension, since we must learn to resist the compulsion to dominate: “Morality demands, first and foremost, this abstention. First obligation: restraint. First maxim: before doing good, avoid evil. Abstain from all evil; simply hold back.”
The second lesson concerns the goal of an education system that seeks to keep pace with the digital transformation, namely: to work toward the development of “algorithmic or procedural cognition” (Petite Poucette). Rather than teaching ideas (“Let us not give power to ideas, for they multiply the reach of power,” Le Tiers-Instruit), we should focus on what falls under “algorithmic” and “procedural” concepts, which—through mastery of code—will grant concrete power over reality.
“Innovative and fleeting intuition” and the “incandescent joy of invention” will always remain unique to humankind (until a fourth mutation occurs?). The time has come for “a new genius, inventive intelligence, and authentic cognitive subjectivity” (Thumbelina). For “the purpose of education is the end of education itself—that is, invention” (The Third Estate).
