En April 2022, AgroParisTech students proclaim during the graduation ceremony: “Several of us do not want to pretend to be proud and deserving of obtaining this diploma at the end of a training which globally pushes to participate in the social and ecological devastations in progress. »
At the beginning of June, they are followed by a student from HEC who declares feeling a “deep malaise” by understanding that the professions to which these studies lead are ” the main cause “ of environmental collapse. Then it is the turn of students from Sciences Po, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris or the Ecole Polytechnique to speak.
All regret that their studies are not more adapted to today’s world, anticipating the world of tomorrow. All regret being promised a job that does not correspond to the meaning they want to give to their lives. These public speeches reflect a turning point which the entire teaching body must reflect on.
From the normalization of deviance to the loss of meaning
If this movement begins within these great schools, one can wonder about its probable development in medicine. Today, medical students are struggling to mobilize, when they have many reasons to do so. They evolve within a health system that is out of breath. Their training is long and grueling, and their suffering is increasingly visible.
According to the Intersyndicale des Internes, there is one suicide in this category of students every 18 days. Some universities introduce new disciplines such as computer science, ethics or philosophy. Health simulation is experiencing strong development. But the learning offered during the initial course remains generally little diversified both in terms of content and form.
The study of organizational and human functioning, however, teaches us to identify the normalization of deviance. This phenomenon occurs when the actors of an organization, so accustomed to deviant behaviors, no longer consider them as such. Sad justification for this standardization, it is common to hear people say: “We’ve always done it that way. » However, we must change course.
A distortion, source of suffering
While degraded functioning causes a reduction in the quality of care, the impact it can have on caregivers and health students is also often overlooked. Indeed, they express a loss of meaning and find themselves out of step with the image they had of their job. This distortion is a source of suffering.
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