Le Professeur Censuré: On enseigne à vos enfants des croyances dangereuses ? J’ai refusé de le faire

Summary

The interview with philosopher and educator Normand Baillargeon explores how people form beliefs, how propaganda and cognitive biases influence them, and what schools and individuals can do to support critical thinking. His central warning is that people are not only vulnerable to manipulation by others; they can also mislead themselves.

Propaganda and public opinion

• Baillargeon argues that political and economic institutions may try to shape public opinion, so people should examine who is promoting an idea and whose interests it serves.
• He uses Edward Bernays’s public-relations campaign for the tobacco industry as an example. At a time when public smoking by women was frowned upon, Bernays arranged for women to light cigarettes during a New York parade and call them “torches of freedom.” The campaign framed smoking as women’s liberation while promoting tobacco sales.
• He compares this approach to “Like a Girl,” an Always advertisement that challenged sexist assumptions but also served the company’s commercial interests. He describes this kind of cause-related advertising as “femvertising”: a company can use a worthy social message to market its products.
• His broader lesson is to ask whether a message’s apparent moral purpose is also serving an organization’s economic or political goals.

Why intelligent people can believe false things

Baillargeon says intelligence does not make anyone immune to error. Several factors can distort judgment:

• Conformity: In the Asch experiments, people sometimes gave an answer they knew was wrong after hearing others in a group give it.
• Cognitive dissonance: When actions conflict with someone’s self-image, they may reinterpret the facts rather than admit they acted wrongly. Baillargeon illustrates this with a group whose failed prediction of the world’s end was reinterpreted as proof that their beliefs had saved the world.
• Confirmation bias: People tend to seek or interpret information in ways that support what they already believe.
• Overconfidence: The interview discusses the Dunning–Kruger effect: people with less knowledge may be more confident, while learning more often reveals how much remains uncertain.
• Social-media echo chambers: Online platforms can reward quick, confident opinions and expose people mainly to views that reinforce their existing beliefs.

A recurring recommendation is to remember that one may be mistaken, especially on complicated questions, and to compare ideas with people who have thoughtful reasons for disagreeing.

How to practise critical thinking

Baillargeon recommends a form of open, evidence-based discussion he calls “democratic conversation.” In practice, this means:

• Acknowledge when a topic is complex and avoid pretending that every question has a simple answer.
• Separate factual claims from the values or goals involved in a disagreement.
• Listen to people who disagree, and try to understand their strongest arguments rather than dismissing them.
• Ask yourself—or the other person—what the best argument against your position is, and how you would answer it.
• Be willing to revise a view when the evidence warrants it.
• Avoid insults and allow for nuance, while recognizing that some questions have clear answers and do not require artificial balance.
• Build enough background knowledge to reason competently about a subject; a confident opinion without relevant knowledge is not well-grounded.

Education: knowledge without indoctrination

Baillargeon argues that education should transmit a broad range of reliable knowledge—including science, the humanities and knowledge about religion—without turning instruction into indoctrination. He identifies two dangers for schools:

1. Teaching pseudoscience as knowledge. He cites astrology and educational claims such as fixed “learning styles” or a simple left-brain/right-brain division as examples he considers unsupported.
2. Failing to cultivate civic virtues. Schools should help students develop intellectual humility, nuance, the ability to listen, and the ability to question claims responsibly.

He says curricula should acknowledge the limits of any single perspective and make room for other interpretations, without teachers simply imposing their own views. In his view, schools should help produce students who follow well-supported norms but can question claims that are uncertain or unjustified.

Baillargeon says he resigned from his university position, partly because of disagreements over what he regarded as pseudoscientific ideas in education and the difficulty of debating them freely. Although the interviewer frames this as losing his job, Baillargeon describes his departure as a resignation.

Direct Instruction and prior knowledge

Baillargeon presents Direct Instruction, developed by Siegfried Engelmann, as a teaching approach he believes deserves more attention. He describes its basic process as:

• Establish what the student already knows and what they are expected to learn.
• Break the learning goal into successive steps.
• Teach each step systematically.
• Check whether the student has mastered it.
• Use that assessment to decide what to teach next.
• Avoid overwhelming working memory, which can hold only a limited amount of information at once; connect new material to knowledge already stored in long-term memory.

He says the approach was tested in the large Follow Through study, which compared educational methods, and claims Direct Instruction performed particularly well across the measured outcomes. He also stresses the importance of prior knowledge: without it, people are less equipped to evaluate difficult questions or recognize misleading claims.

Social media and artificial intelligence

Baillargeon sees risks in the influence of social-media platforms and AI, particularly for young people:

• Social media can encourage rapid reactions, self-presentation and conformity, while keeping users in ideologically reinforcing communities.
• He supports restricting children’s access to social media and managing smartphone use in schools, while encouraging in-person socializing and reading.
• He warns that relying on AI for answers may not build long-term knowledge or independent reasoning. He refers to a comparison involving SAT test-takers that, as he recounts it, found the group using Google performed best and the group using AI performed worst.
• He acknowledges that AI may have benefits and that its development is changing quickly, but argues that its influence and possible risks deserve scrutiny—including the power of the companies that develop and deploy it.

Truth, science and conspiracy claims

Baillargeon defines truth, in empirical matters, as a claim’s correspondence with the facts. Scientific conclusions can be revised, but that does not mean that every claim is equally plausible or that truth is merely subjective. He distinguishes empirical science from formal fields such as logic and mathematics, where validity or consistency is the central concern.

On conspiracy theories, he makes two points:

• Some conspiracies are real and documented, so the label “conspiracy theory” should not automatically end inquiry.
• Many proposed conspiracies are unsupported. A common error is to interpret every detail as confirmation of a theory, as in the claim that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike.

His advice is to ask what evidence supports a claim, consider alternative explanations, and avoid treating evidence that could fit many explanations as proof of one particular theory.

Practical fact-checking steps

Baillargeon relays three suggestions that he attributes to professional fact-checkers:

• Do not automatically click the first search results. Look beyond the top listings and compare several sources.
• Investigate the source. Follow links or other information about the site, its authors and who may be funding or organizing it.
• Look at the discussion page on Wikipedia. It can reveal disputes, uncertainties and competing interpretations around a topic, even when Wikipedia itself is not the final authority.

He also recommends reading people who disagree with you, especially on politically or ideologically charged issues.

Sex, gender and schools

The interview includes a contentious discussion of sex and gender. Baillargeon presents his own position: he distinguishes biological sex, which he describes in terms of reproductive gametes, from variations in sex characteristics and from gender identity. He says trans people’s rights should be recognized, while also arguing that possible conflicts of rights—particularly in sports, prisons and changing or toilet facilities—should be debated.

He is especially concerned about how schools discuss gender with young children. He argues that the subject should be approached cautiously, that biological facts should not be denied, and that decisions about what to teach and at what age should be informed by relevant expertise and strong evidence. These are Baillargeon’s views in a politically sensitive debate, not conclusions established by the interview itself.

Other concerns and personal reflections

Baillargeon says justified challenges to established ideas can be important to human progress in science, mathematics and politics. He does not advocate disobedience for its own sake; he argues that schools should teach students when to follow well-supported norms and when to question them.

He identifies rising inequality, the nuclear threat and human-caused climate change as major concerns. He also says he would be deeply unsettled to discover that he was wrong about his support for self-management economic models, while emphasizing that he tries to consider opposing arguments.

Speakers and sources mentioned

Speakers

• Normand Baillargeon — philosopher, educator and interview guest.
• The interviewer/host of the Manal Show — asks the questions; no name is given in the subtitles.

People, works, studies and examples mentioned

• John Dewey — democratic conversation and education.
• Edward Bernays — public relations and propaganda; his book Propaganda is mentioned.
• Sigmund Freud and Karl Popper — psychoanalysis and the distinction between science and pseudoscience.
• Richard Feynman — the principle that people must guard against misleading themselves.
• Solomon Asch — conformity experiments.
• Leon Festinger — cognitive dissonance.
• Siegfried Engelmann — developer of Direct Instruction.
• Jean Piaget — mentioned in connection with educational approaches.
• David Dunning and Justin Kruger — the Dunning–Kruger effect.
• Jonathan Haidt — apparently the author of The Anxious Generation; the name is garbled in the subtitles.
• Yoshua Bengio and Nick Bostrom — AI risks and hypothetical scenarios.
• Judith Butler — discussed in the sex-and-gender debate.
• Alexander Kropotkin, Noam Chomsky and Bertrand Russell — authors Baillargeon says he read while exploring political views.
• Milton Friedman — mentioned as an example of someone whose views Baillargeon read despite disagreement.
• Aristotle and Jacques Prévert — mentioned in the closing rapid-fire questions and personal remarks.
• Helen? Keech — the name is unclear in the subtitles; presented as the leader of a group whose failed apocalypse prediction was reinterpreted.
• The Creel Commission, Head Start and Follow Through — public-opinion and education programs discussed.
• The Asch experiments, the SAT comparison, and the Paul McCartney replacement theory — research or examples used in the discussion.
• Always, the tobacco industry, social-media companies and AI companies — commercial actors discussed as examples of institutions that can shape public messaging.