The cult of incompetence

by Émile Faguet

The committee of examiners which admits a candidate to St. Cyr appoints an officer. The committee which admits a candidate to the École Polytechnique appoints an officer or an engineer. A committee also which refuses a candidate at either of these places is encroaching on the National Sovereignty, because it is forbidding the National Sovereignty to make of this young man an officer or an engineer. This is co-optation. This is a guarantee of efficiency. Here a wall is raised against incompetence, and against the jobbery under which incompetence would profit.

It is hardly necessary for me to add that this co-optation is limited to a very narrow field of operation. It is confined in fact to the threshold of a man's career. Once the candidate has been consecrated official, by a board of examining officials, he belongs, both as regards advancement, promotion and the reverse, to the central authority alone, except in certain cases. The co-optation of officials is merely a co-optation by elimination. The elimination is made once and for all, and the non-eliminated (i.e., the successful candidate) steps at once into the toils of the Government, that is, into the toils of popular electioneering and party politics, when all the abuses which I have enumerated can and do arise. To be fair I had of course to point out that we had tried to invent some slight barriers against the omnipotence of incompetence, which prevent it being absolutely supreme.

Unfortunately these prophylactic measures are very badly organised, and, far from being capable of amendment, ought to be completely revolutionised.

The examination system in our country is founded on a misconception, I mean on the confusion between knowledge and competence. We search conscientiously for competence or efficiency, and we believe that we have found it when we find knowledge, but that is an error. An examination requires from a candidate that he shall know, and competition demands that he shall know more than the others, but that is almost all that examination and competition require of him. Therefrom results one of the most painful open sores of our civilisation,—preparation for examinations.

Preparation for examination is responsible for intellectual indigestion, for minds overloaded with useless information, and for a system of cramming, which at once takes the heart out of men, perhaps with good ability, just at the age when their mental activity is most keen; which, further, as the result of this surfeit, disgusts for the rest of his life and renders impotent for all intellectual effort, the unfortunate patient who has been condemned to undergo this treatment for five, eight, and sometimes ten years of his youth.

I am satisfied, if I may be allowed to speak of myself in order to support my argument by an instance well known to me, that, if I have been able to work from the age of twenty-five to that of sixty-three, it is because I have never succeeded except very moderately, and I am proud of it, in competitive examinations. Being of a curious turn of mind I have been interested in the subject set in the syllabus, but in other matters also, and the syllabus has been neglected. I sometimes passed, more often I failed, with the result that at twenty-six I was behind my contemporaries, but I was not overworked, broken down, and utterly sick of all intellectual effort. I admit that some of my contemporaries who never failed in an examination, and who passed them all with great brilliance, have worked as hard as I have up to sixty, but they are extremely few.

The curious thing is that the results, not perhaps disastrous, but obviously very unsatisfactory, of this examination system do not lead us to abandon it (that perhaps would be an extreme measure), but make us aggravate and complicate it. Legal and medical examinations are much "stiffer" than they used to be, and they require a greater physical effort, but without requiring or obtaining any greater intellectual value. In truth, one might say, examination is nothing more than a test of good health, and it is a very searching test, for it often succeeds in destroying it.

Here is an example which I know well. It is necessary, if a man desire to gain distinction as a professor of secondary education, that he should be a bachelor, a licentiate, an agrégé or a doctor. This is a qualification that counts, and it means ten examinations or competitions, two for the first half of the bachelor's degree, two for the second, two for the licentiate, two for agrégé, two for the doctor's degree. This, moreover, does not appear to be enough. Between the second part of the bachelor's degree and the licentiate's degree there is normally an interval of two years; between the licentiate and the agrégation two years, and between the agrégation and the doctor's degree there is generally three or four years. You perceive the danger! Between the licence and the agrégation, to go no further at present, the future professor has two whole years to himself. That is to say, that during the first of these two years he will work alone. He can work freely, he can study in what direction he pleases, without thinking of an examination at the end of twelve months; he has escaped for the moment from the servitude of the syllabus. The prospect makes us shudder with apprehension. It is sadly to be feared that the young man may take a rest and draw breath, or worse still he may be carried into some extraneous study by his personal aptitudes or tastes. The personality of the candidate has here an opening, a moment at which it has a possibility of asserting itself. That must be stopped at all costs.

The authorities, therefore, have put in an intermediate examination between the licence and the agrégation. The examination, it is true, is on a subject chosen by the candidate himself; so much it is only fair to admit. The subject chosen, however, must be submitted to the professors. Their advice and indeed assistance must be invited. The result, if not the object, of this examination is to prevent the candidate, during this perilous year of liberty, from developing original ideas of his own and acting on them.

One examination every year for ten years—that is the ideal of the modern professor for the future professors who are in course of being trained. Between the second part of the bachelor's degree and the licentiate, as there is there an interval of two years, they will presently perceive that there ought to be an examination at the end of the first year, and we shall have certificates of study in intermediate, secondary, higher subjects. Between the agrégation and the doctorat, there are four years, and naturally we shall want three examinations just to see how the future professor is getting on with his theses, to encumber him with assistance and to prevent him doing them alone; first examination called the Bibliography of the Theses for the Doctorat, second examination called the Methodology of the Doctorat, third examination called the Preparation for the Sustaining of the Thesis, and then the examination for the doctor's degree itself.