La résistance des œuvres
On a justifié l'effacement même du concept de culture au profit de celui de compétences par crainte de voir imposer les canons académiques d'une élite dirigeante. Mais à cette conception simpliste et sociologisante de la culture, il convient d'opposer la résistance des œuvres.
Étudiant la valeur cognitive des textes complexes, une équipe de l'université de Colombie-Britannique (1) a fait lire à un groupe de sujets une nouvelle de Kafka, Un médecin de campagne (2), tandis que d'autres cobayes se voyaient proposer une version vulgarisée et simplifiée du même récit. On a ensuite demandé aux deux groupes de rechercher des patterns dans des séries de caractères. Les lecteurs de la version originale ont bien mieux réussi le test que leurs partenaires. La complexité du texte permet ainsi de le retenir, y compris dans sa forme expressive, alors que les œuvres de vulgarisation, dépourvues de point de vue et de garantie, donc de projet esthétique et éthique, se laissent aisément oublier. La valeur éducatrice de la difficulté semble découler de cela.
François Rastier, Apprendre pour transmettre. L'éducation contre l'idéologie managériale, PUF, 2013, p. 57-58.
Notes
1. L'étude est disponible ici. "The Frog in Kierkegaard’s Beer: Finding Meaning in the Threat-Compensation Literature", Social and Personality Psychology Compass, octobre 2010.
""The idea is that when you're exposed to a meaning threat – something that fundamentally does not make sense – your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment," said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author of the article. "And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat." Meaning, according to Proulx, is an expected association within one's environment. Fire, for example, is associated with extreme heat, and putting your hand in a flame and finding it icy cold would constitute a threat to that meaning. "It would be very disturbing to you because it wouldn't make sense," he said. As part of their research, Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the article's second co-author, asked a group of subjects to read an abridged and slightly edited version of Kafka's "The Country Doctor," which involves a nonsensical – and in some ways disturbing – series of events. A second group read a different version of the same short story, one that had been rewritten so that the plot and literary elements made sense. The subjects were then asked to complete an artificial-grammar learning task in which they were exposed to hidden patterns in letter strings. They were asked to copy the individual letter strings and then to put a mark next to those that followed a similar pattern. "People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings – clearly they were motivated to find structure," said Proulx. "But what's more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did."" ("Reading Kafka Improves Learning", 15/09/09)
Reading Kafka Improves Learning, Suggests UCSB Psychology Study - See more at: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2009/012685/reading-kafka-improves-learning-sug...
2. Cette nouvelle, rédigée en 1917, s'achève ainsi : "Nu, exposé au froid de ce siècle désastreux, avec une voiture de ce monde et des chevaux qui n'en sont pas, je vais à la dérive, comme un vieil homme." (Actes sud, 1998)