I was so surprised this morning when I turned on the radio and heard about France’s new idea: the creation of a bac “humanités digitales”. From what was said, the idea is to attract students to a new kind scholarship, to show them for instance that you can learn history using digital collections or French literature with textual analysis tools.
Behind this idea is also the thought that this kind of training will be valuable on the job market, especially for people in the humanities, who will not only bring their humanities training to their future job, but also their knowledge of the digital world (such as the terrifying “big data”).
I think this is a great idea, but we need to make sure that the basics will still be taught: students will still have to learn how to write a good essay and how to think critically.
For more information, lease to this segment on France Info.