The law has just spoken, and I wish first to do it justice. It forbids social networks to children under fifteen — this is the digital age of majority that a text of July 7, 2023 had established, and which we are finally preparing to enforce; it banishes the telephone from high schools, as it already was from middle schools, "from bell to bell," starting in September. The intention is good, and I shall not mock it: there is in these walls being raised a sincere concern for a childhood we see losing itself in a flood of images it does not master. To protect the child from danger it cannot yet measure is the first duty of those who love it.

But I know this temptation, having fought it all my life: the belief that one has settled a question of education the moment one has pronounced a prohibition. This is the hidden vice of the law. It delegates to defense what belongs to instruction; it takes the closed door for the illuminated path. Forbidding access teaches nothing; it merely defers the day of learning — and defers it to the worst moment, when the child, now grown, will no longer have a master at its side.

For consider what happens. At fifteen, at eighteen, the wall falls all at once; and one throws into the ocean one to whom one has never taught to swim, under the pretext that one had kept them far from water. A people one merely protects remains a minor people; a people one instructs is an armed people. All my faith rests in this sentence: freedom is not preserved by ignorance of what threatens it, but by the knowledge that disarms its poison. One does not make a mind free by keeping it from the world; one makes it free there by giving it the means to judge it.

What then should be done, in place — or rather above — prohibition? That from the youngest age, before the child even holds a screen, one teaches them to read. No longer merely letters, but images, signs, networks. A science of signs — call it semiology — an education of the gaze that teaches to dismantle an image as one dismantles a sentence: who made it, for whom, to what end, what it shows and what it conceals. An understanding of these machines that decide, in our place, what we shall see — this hidden grammar of the feed, of recommendation, of the anger that makes the click. I had once demanded that the Republic teach all its children to read, because a man who cannot read is at the mercy of those who read for him. The reasoning has not changed; only the alphabet has been enlarged.

For this world is now unavoidable, and it is vain to pretend to ignore it. One has never preserved a generation from a century by forbidding it entry: one has merely delivered it, unarmed, to those who had understood it. Forbidding networks and screens is not mastering the digital world; it is refusing to teach it, and abandoning its mastery to merchants of attention, who ask, precisely, only to instruct our children in our stead.

And here lies the major stake, the one that contains all others: not to keep the child out of the machine, but to put reflection into its very practice. Let them learn to use these tools at the same time they learn to think about them; let use and judgment grow together, in a single movement, instead of succeeding one another too late. There has been inscribed in the circulars the fine name of "reasoned digital"; let it finally be given its true meaning. Reasoned does not mean rationed. It is not the hour of screen one must count: it is reason one must put into it.

The Republic that instructs does not resemble the one that encloses. One builds walls and believes it has acted; the other opens doors and teaches how to cross them. The first protects today's child; the second arms tomorrow's man. Let us close screens at school, if the calm of the classroom requires it — I see no harm in it. But let this silence serve to teach what the noise, outside, ceaselessly tells them. Otherwise we shall not have educated a generation: we shall merely have made it wait.