For a November of national education
The consolidation of English in the primary curriculum and the withdrawal of philosophy from the scientific baccalaureate stem from a laudable intention: that of preserving the school from ideological controversies which could weaken civil peace. This prudence deserves to be welcomed rather than contested. But it was not enough to extinguish the controversies that it precisely wanted to avoid. These remain, marginal in their scale but significant in their function: they rarely question the educational issues themselves and rather serve, in a barely veiled manner, as a pretext for geopolitical alignments of which their authors, most often, do not realize that they are themselves being exploited.
Faced with this observation, the fairest path is not to entrust the reform to a technocracy, however competent and well-intentioned it may be, but to open a democratic and participatory dynamic, involving, as a priority, teachers, researchers, inspectors and the entire educational family, including parent associations. A national debate, organized around a White Paper drawn up in advance by a multidisciplinary committee — coming from education, research, economics, but also defense and national security institutions, all chosen for their integrity and recognized competence — would give this reform the legitimacy and depth it calls for.
Power as a condition of independence
The real issue of this reform goes far beyond the adjustment of a school timetable: it is the power of Algeria that is at stake, the primary condition of its independence, without which social progress remains a pious wish. This power must be built within a tight deadline, a decade, two at most for the most optimistic, and there is nothing arbitrary about this deadline. It is dictated by an unavoidable demographic reality: Algeria records nearly a million births each year, a predominantly young and increasingly urban population, whose needs — employment, housing, health, training — are growing at the same rate. These young people have grown up amid a continuous and tangible improvement in living conditions: life expectancy, which was only forty-six years in 1962, is now around eighty years. This health progress, real and valuable, has created a social expectation that only a productive, diversified and knowledgeable economy can sustainably satisfy; a rent economy will no longer be able to do this, neither by its volumes, nor by its nature.
This economic emergency is coupled with a geostrategic emergency. Algeria’s return to the European energy market, in a context of reorganization of global gas balances, is taking place over a limited window, before already established gas giants – Russia, Iran or Qatar – sustainably occupy the space that the current situation opens up to it. This window will close all the more quickly since hydrocarbons, it must be remembered, are not a renewable resource: time works against income, and it will only work for Algeria if it knows, in the same movement, building the economy called to succeed it, which must be diversified, solid and efficient.
Overcoming false divisions
Responding to this double emergency requires overcoming divisions which, for decades, have paralyzed rather than structured the national educational debate: modernity versus authenticity, so-called hard sciences versus so-called soft sciences, science versus religion. None of these divisions are innocent; all bear the trace of historical overdeterminations, some of which predate colonization itself, and most of which were aggravated, if not produced, by it. The opposition between modernity and authenticity deserves to be clarified first: a modernity reduced to appearance, purely museum or folkloric, devoid of all social and historical efficiency, is not modernity, but its illusion – its exact opposite.
The same is true of the opposition, even more insidious, between so-called hard sciences and so-called soft sciences. This artificial hierarchy has continued, for decades, to drain the country’s development efforts of substance. It produces a form of alienation among scientists themselves, all specialties combined, disoriented between a valued technicality and a sense that they are refused to cultivate; it feeds, as a corollary, the hemorrhage of executives to the most developed nations, precisely at a moment in history when all of humanity has an urgent need, not for science or sense, but for science and sense united.
This is where a third divide comes into play, even more artificial: that which we claim to establish between science and religion, between science and spirituality. This divide only exists in narrow minds, ignorant of the fact that philosophy, like all science in principle, has developed in close connection with theology, and not against it, including in contemporary times. The founder of algebra, al-Khwarizmî, that of the experimental method, Ibn al-Haytham, any more than Galileo, Descartes or Newton, were neither atheists nor even agnostics; Einstein himself, who rejected the idea of a personal God, just as firmly refused the label of atheist. The history of science thus consistently denies the opposition that we would like to impose on it.
Lessons from history
This same lucidity must extend to philosophy itself, which it would be wrong to erect into an untouchable totem. Its relationship to the power of nations is in reality more complex than a straightforward reading would suggest, and history, here again, offers contrasting lessons rather than a single verdict. Athens, cradle of Western thought under Pericles, was defeated by a Sparta which had cultivated no comparable philosophical tradition, but which had made collective discipline and training the basis of its cohesion. This resounding defeat, prolonged by the convulsions of the Peloponnesian War, profoundly shook Greek thought: it was from this crisis that a radically new philosophical tradition was born, with Socrates and then Plato. Transmitted by Aristotle to his student Alexander, this tradition made modest Macedonia the driving force of a power which, through culture as much as through weapons, lastingly dominated an essential part of the Mediterranean and as far as Asia. Rome, for its part, built and governed the largest empire of Antiquity without ever making philosophy a state priority, preferring law and the art of governing. Arab-Muslim civilization later carried this heritage even further: it was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, under the Abbasids, which translated and overturned the Greek, Persian and Indian heritages to produce major scientific advances; Finally, it was Fatimid Cairo which, by founding Al-Azhar, made philosophy, understood as science in the broadest sense, a center of Mediterranean influence, a work in which medieval Algeria participated through its fighters and its scholars. These contrasting experiences teach the same lesson: philosophy is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of power; it is a possible instrument, whose value is measured by its articulation with other knowledge, not by its proclaimed status.
The same lesson is verified in the observation of contemporary educational systems, the diversity of which prohibits any thoughtless mimicry. The French model imposes philosophy on all high school students in a dissertation form inherited from the 19th century; the Anglo-Saxon model erases it almost entirely from the scientific core in favor of early specialization, even if it means paying the price through a deficit in ethical culture that is now widely documented. China combines scientific education with civic and moral training drawn from Confucian heritage; Japan maintains, alongside mathematics, a teaching of ethics which never completely disappears. The contemporary Arab-Muslim world alone illustrates this lack of consensus: Egypt reserves philosophy for literary courses, Iran replaces it, for scientists, with a distinct ethical and theological training, while Saudi Arabia recently made the opposite choice by reintroducing critical thinking in its secondary education, precisely to support its own economic modernization. None of these models can be transposed as is; all, on the other hand, confirm that there is no single formula, and that Algeria must invent its own rather than importing just one.
European history offers, on this point, an instructive parallel, provided that we also measure its limits. In 1806, in Jena, the Prussian army, although heir to the military prestige of Frederick II, collapsed in a single day before Napoleon’s troops. The following year, the Treaty of Tilsit sanctioned this debacle with an even deeper humiliation: Prussia lost half of its territory and its population, and all the Germanic States found themselves reduced to the rank of vassal of the French Empire. It was in this context of military, political and moral collapse that the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte delivered his Speech to the German Nation in Berlin in 1808. He does not call for an armed revenge, then out of reach, but for a refoundation of national education, the only one capable, according to him, of reconstituting in the long term what the weapons had just destroyed in one day: the will and the capacity of a people to dispose of themselves.
We must situate our own reform in its proper historical context, which is not that of Fichte’s Germany. Algeria is not approaching this project as a defeated nation, seeking recovery after a defeat; it approaches it as a victorious nation, returned to the stage of history at the end of an epic resistance which continues to command the admiration of humanity, for having escaped, at the cost of immeasurable sacrifices, a project of annihilation. But not being, today, a defeated nation in no way exempts us from lucidly confronting our own past, particularly the disaster of July 1830, when the expeditionary force of King Charles Those who believe they can explain this collapse by the lack of courage of the Dey, or by the mere dilapidation of his army and his administration, are seriously deluding themselves: these explanations, attractive by their simplicity, exempt them from facing a more demanding reality to admit, that which the late Malek Bennabi designated by the term “colonizability” – a vulnerability of civilization, a thought which has become ossified and cut off from all social and historical efficiency, long before the first cannon shot was fired. fired on Algiers. It is this sclerosis, and no other, that the current reform must ward off: not out of fear of a new foreign invasion, which, in the case of Algeria, would be a disaster for the peoples at least of the Western Mediterranean, but out of the need to never again relive this civilizational blindness which makes a nation incapable of understanding and anticipating the balance of power which ultimately decides its destiny over several generations, while the defeat of Jena and other events also crucial ones clearly announced it.
This historical vigilance is not an academic exercise. The contemporary world is seeing the resurgence, in new forms, of logics of predation and domination that we thought were over: wars of aggression are taking place today in full view of everyone, without international morality or the law which results from it no longer truly managing to contain them. A nation that has not built, through knowledge and the power that results from it, the means to gain respect would expose itself, in such a context, to the same vulnerabilities as those which precipitated the disaster of 1830.
It is another November 1st, this one in the field of sciences taken in their true meaning, that current generations must get down to, and without delay. The survival of Algeria requires it. The dignity of his glorious people demands it. And when Algeria really gets moving, Allah infallibly supports it.
