At the 3/6/9/12 association, we place great emphasis on the complementarity of image culture and book culture. We now know that there are at least eight forms of intelligence, but each of us generally develops no more than three or four. There are, however, two that every human being possesses to a significant degree: visuo-spatial intelligence, which lets us quickly pick out what matters to us in a landscape or an image, and verbal intelligence, which lets us communicate with our fellow humans using a shared language. Without the first of these two forms of intelligence, our distant ancestors could never have found their way back after moving away from their rock shelter to go hunting, and without the second, they could not have explained what they had found along the way to the members of their group who had stayed in camp. Every human being is inhabited both by the desire and pleasure of speaking, and by the desire and pleasure of making images. The future belongs neither to children who develop an exclusively verbal intelligence, nor to those who develop an exclusively visual intelligence. It belongs to those who can move from one to the other, that is, who are able both to build a story around an image or a set of images, and just as able to produce an image or a set of images from a narrative.
The 2019 French papers for the brevet seem to have drawn the consequences of this obvious truth. This subject offered candidates the choice of an imaginative task or a reflective one. But both invited candidates to bring together their thinking about images and about texts.
The imaginative task asked candidates to create the story through which Robert Doisneau might recount an image evoking young people in his childhood.
“ Now grown up, one of the children in Robert Doisneau’s photograph recounts, like Albert Camus, the games of his childhood. He describes the scene shown in the photograph.
Imagine his account, showing how play allows children, in a moment of shared joy, to transform the reality around them.
You may choose to write your account in the first or the third person. ”
As for the reflective task, it asked pupils to discuss the possibility open to everyone of living a fictional life through literature and cinema alike, and why not through video games.
“ Literature, cinema and the other arts allow us to discover the lives of fictional or real characters. What can this discovery bring you?
Develop your point of view by drawing on specific examples from your own culture and from the works studied during your schooling. ”
What was missing from this exam, you may say, was the possibility of creating an image from a story. It is true that this is a difficult task to set in a national exam. On the other hand, it would be a great pity if teachers did not invite children, from nursery school right up to the end of upper secondary school, to build images from their own narratives, or from narratives they might borrow from classmates, or even from authors studied during the year.
This is not the only revolution that schools need today because of the changing world, but it is one of them!
Learning, reading, writing, counting, and understanding images: these should be the basics of 21st-century education.
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, holds a doctorate in psychology with accreditation to supervise research, is a member of the Académie des technologies, and is an associate researcher at Université Paris VII Denis Diderot (CRPMS).
