24
PETER BROOKS
should have complained that their education gave them no direct out–
lets into the productive spheres of modem society.
In terms of the student condition, all this has meant a system with
very little opportunity for intellectual exploration, where one has been
forced to continue to cultivate what one early committed himself to,
and proved himself in by competitive exam.
It
has been virtually im–
possible to move horizontally from one discipline to another, difficult
to gain instruction in new fields which ought to be influencing methods
in one's own field, difficult to begin the study of new languages and
new techniques. Creative teaching has been rendered impossible both
by the massive overcrowding of facilities (manifest since the war, it
has recently, with the arrival of the postwar demographic wave at
college age, become outrageous) and structures which permit no dialogue.
The traditional pillar of the structures is the chaired professor, who
traditionally arrived three times a week (his teaching load of three
hours a week is defined by a statute of 1840) to present his
cours
magistral,
a bleakly specialized lecture proffering the sum of human
knowledge about one of the texts selected (by some distant committee)
for the exam on which depends
licence
or
agregation,
then sometimes
talked with the doctoral candidates under his direction for a few
moments, then departed. Section work has been carried out by As–
sistants under impossible conditions - groups of up to a hundred, with
that many papers to correct, low pay, utter dependence on the professor
who is the Assistant's
patron,
who has power of life or death over his
future career, who can, and often does, use a man - sometimes forty
years old or more - as an intellectual flunky, even to the point of
plagiarizing his research. Access to libraries is so difficult, their read–
ing rooms so overcrowded, that the French student has to rely far too
much on what is available in bookstores, on the eclectic formation of his
own private library - including, inevitably, a large number of desiccated
course outlines and manuals.
It is not surprising that such a system has reinforced, in the con–
secrated term, a student's alienation - from the university itself, from
the culture it incarnates, from the class and the society that formed the
culture. The alienation has often been unformed because uninformed,
because the university has had so little hold on modern realities. This
may in part explain why French students so avidly consume new ideas
coming from outside the university - or from its peripheries, like Struc–
turalism - why intellectual modishness is so prevalent. The need for
autodidacticism is great, and here the phenomenon of the private
library, the individual collection of what looks most attractive in the
