Threatened by Prejudices: French Revolutionary Textbooks | Hacker News Reader

Threatened by Prejudices: French Revolutionary Textbooks

jhiblog.org

12 pointsPetiver9 comments

Are any translations of such textbooks available? I'm looking.

Most of the links in the article are broken. Try "bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr" instead of "bspe-p-pub.paris.fr". Catalog entries can be found, but not full text. Here's the pamphlet mentioned.[1]

The archives of the meetings on planning the post-Revolution curriculum are in the Internet Archive.[2] Seven volumes, in French. Probably useful only to someone doing a doctoral thesis on education in France.

[1] http://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000...

[2] https://archive.org/stream/procsverbauxd01fran

Most of these books should be available in digitalised form on Gallica (from the National Library), here's the full scan of your first link for example:

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k48859k.r

Thanks. I may be misreading this, but that seems to say that the object of education is to familiarize young people, by practice, with their constitutional rights and duties. There's talk of immunizing young people against the frivolities and corruption of the previous age. (He probably means the court at Versailles. Marie Antoinette and all that.) Prejudice comes up on page 5, as a result of those goals, not a object of it. He means class prejudice. Remember, they'd just dumped the nobility and killed off many of them. This is a sketch for the implementation plan for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Not sure about the historic accuracy of this, but this scene [1] from Andrzej Wajda's Danton (1983) depicts the household of Robespierre and seems apropos.

[1]: https://youtu.be/kcwmrh-R7T0?t=3m25s

This reminded me of how lonely I feel in my society; defining prejudices in a Gadamerian way.

Ah, the way to Pol Pot.

Murderous 'enlightenment', wiping out the mind of a society and trying to make a 'tabula rasa' for delirious fantasies of paradise on Earth.

Always works out well.

(Soundtrack: Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KTsXHXMkJA )

There's probably a middle ground between Pol Pot and a therapeutic nihilism that denies the possibility of improving society.

A middle ground? No way! Heresy! Either we utterly demolish all social norms and structures and create a top-down designed society, or we enshrine all traditions as immutable for all eternity. Anything else is just a wishy-washy half measure.

In all seriousness...

The optimum in a complex multi-objective optimization problem is almost never at the edge, and nuances do in fact matter. It really feels like at some point circa the 1960s American society completely lost the ability to think in terms of anything other than immutable absolute dogmas (a.k.a. fundamentalism in all its forms) and simplified sound-bite slogans.

You can't improve closed systems. You just change who carries what cost and shout loudly that you've made things better.

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