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Claudine Monteil
Simone de Beauvoir Today
The author evokes her long friendship with Simone de Beauvoir and offers a detailed portrayal of women’s lives today.
Françoise Salomon
Silent Child The Story of a Schizophrenic
This largely autobiographical book recounts the story of a family brutally shaken their sons violence and mental illnessthough nothing had previously seemed to distinguish him from other teenagers. It is a highly moving chronicle of the world of schizophrenia which remains little known by the general public. The mother of a schizophrenic child, Françoise Salomon is an active member of the French Union nationale des amis et des familles des malades mentaux.
Lionel Naccache
The Sign Song
An essay illuminated by neuroscience, which aims to explore the psychological and cerebral cogs involved in the act of interpretation, which we are not generally aware of. A petition or manifesto in favour of defending our subjectivity and individuality, at a time when ever more efficient, air-tight and uniform signage tends to make us lose track of the fact that we are the inventors of our own understanding of the world’s signs.
Philippe Moati
The Sick Hyperconsumer Society
Hyperconsumption undermines social cohesion and “living together”
Stella Baruk
Si 7 = 0. Quelles mathématiques pour l'école ?
Stella Baruk is known for her uncompromising criticism of the way mathematics is taught at school. She sees children's frequent aversion to the subject as a clear demonstration of the failure of current methods. Following her earlier book, L'Age du Capitaine, in which she denounced the meaningless mathematical problems that children were burdened with and enjoined to solve, she now addresses the difficulties encountered by the new generation of the captain's children. She has reproduced pages from the exercise books of primary school pupils, with a commentary underlining the confusion created by modern maths in the minds of children who are not yet familiar with mathematics. Her message is clear: the fault lies not in modern maths, but in the fact that the cart has been put before the horse. Modern maths was created to generalise operations and structures that recur in every aspect of mathematics, and modern maths cannot be correctly understood without the full mastery of those operations and structures. Yet, the teaching of mathematics has been turned on its head, with the abstract being taught before the concrete and the general before the specific - with the result that empty formalism is all that is being passed on. Baruk's very precise analyses, illustrated with specific examples, will help parents understand their children's mistakes and difficulties, so that they can help them overcome them. Stella Baruk is a mathematics teacher and pedagogical researcher.