A Simone Weil teacher profile starts when the young philosopher took lycée posts in provincial France. Her classrooms mixed philosophy with Greek, Latin and art history, and she also taught workers in the evenings.
Teaching was the day job of her short adult life, and it shaped her ideas about work and attention. This guide sits within the wider story told in simone weil in france, and it follows her through the towns named in her postings.
How Weil became a lycée teacher
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Weil received her agrégation diploma and then served from late 1931 to mid-1934 as a teacher at lycées. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the agrégation as the French Civil Service Examination, and says she was appointed to a girls’ secondary school in Le Puy.
Her own teacher at the Lycée Henri IV had been the philosopher known as Alain, and the relationship that shaped her view of teaching is covered in simone weil and alain. The same encyclopedia entry adds that, outside her duties at each lycée, she taught philosophy to workers’ groups, lobbied for them and wrote on their behalf.
Le Puy: a girls’ lycée and a workers’ college
As Encyclopedia.com’s entry on Weil tells it, she was assigned to a girls’ lycée in the remote town of Le Puy, where she taught philosophy, Greek, Latin and art history, with a marked indifference to preparing her students for their national exams. The same entry says she poured her energies into lecturing to miners at the Workers’ College in Saint-Étienne, a three-hour train ride from Le Puy.
The Wikipedia biography adds details of her classroom manner: she often held classes outdoors, often refused to share grades with school leadership, and is said to have created a “family atmosphere”. It also reports that her support for local striking workers brought criticism from local elites. Because these details rest on a single secondary account, they are best read as one version of events rather than settled fact.
- Le Puy girls lycee: philosophy, Greek, Latin, art history: philosophy, Greek, Latin, art history
- Saint-Etienne Workers College is a three-hour train ride from Le Puy: three-hour
- Classes held outdoors, family atmosphere: family atmosphere
- Weil dismissed from teaching job in Auxerre and transferred to Roanne: Auxerre
- Weil traveled weekly to Saint-Etienne to teach workers French literature: Saint-Étienne
Auxerre and Roanne: reassignment and lecture notes
Accounts differ on why she left Le Puy. Encyclopedia.com says only that she was reassigned, teaching at lycées in Auxerre and Roanne before deciding to take a leave of absence and work in a factory. The Wikipedia biography states that Weil was dismissed from a teaching job in Auxerre and transferred to Roanne, which implies a conflict with the authorities, and readers should treat the reason as contested between these summaries.
Roanne left the most useful trace for readers of her philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Lectures on Philosophy (1978) is a collection of lecture notes taken by one of her students during the academic year 1933–1934 at a girl’s lycée in Roanne. In those notes, the entry says, Weil is initially critical of sensations as grounds for knowledge and so of empiricist epistemology.
Teaching beyond the classroom
The Wikipedia biography says Weil traveled weekly to Saint-Étienne to teach workers French literature, believing literature could be a tool for revolution and give workers ownership over their heritage. Read alongside the Encyclopedia.com account of the Workers’ College, this suggests the evening lectures mattered to her as much as her school duties did.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy places a journey to Germany in early August 1932, undertaken to understand better the conditions fostering Nazism, in the same period. It says she wrote to friends afterward about the trade unions there, and that her essay “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934) summarized her early thought. The essay, it notes, critiques her own position as an intellectual and privileges manual labor, which is a theme her school years kept pressing on her.
The Wikipedia biography also says Weil donated most of her income to political causes and charitable endeavours, a detail that fits the picture of a teacher whose salary mattered less to her than her commitments.
Leave from teaching and the turn to factory work
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy records that on 20 June 1934 Weil applied for a sabbatical from teaching. She planned to spend the year working in Parisian factories among unskilled women laborers. The episode belongs to a different chapter of her life, which the site covers in simone weil factory work.
Teaching and labor were not separate worlds for her. Encyclopedia.com asks whether she regarded teaching as a form of servitude or as a way of serving humanity, and the question stays open in how scholars read her. What is documented is that she kept returning to the classroom between other commitments.
Bourges and Saint-Quentin: the last posts
Encyclopedia.com reports that during the academic year 1935–36 Weil taught at Bourges while continuing to work for unity among leftist labor unions and for factory reform. The Wikipedia biography says that in 1935 she began teaching in Bourges and started Entre Nous, a journal that was produced and written by factory workers, according to its account.
Her final post came after illness and travel. Encyclopedia.com states that Weil resumed teaching in October 1937 in a lycée in Saint-Quentin, near Paris, but debilitating headaches compelled her to take a leave of absence, and that she never taught again. She later asked for a teaching assignment from the Vichy government, which the same entry presents as evidence of how detached she was from any group.
What her teaching suggests about her ideas
Teaching sits close to a theme that runs through her writing on attention. In her 1941 “Essay on the Concept of Reading”, the Stanford Encyclopedia quotes her: “War, politics, eloquence, art, teaching, all action on others essentially consists in changing what they read.” Scholars may disagree about how directly her classroom practice shaped such statements, since the lecture notes come from a student and not from her own hand.
A later notebook entry, which the Stanford Encyclopedia quotes, reads: “Philosophy (including problems of cognition, etc.) is exclusively an affair of action and practice.” Read beside her working life, the line explains why her teaching never stayed inside the school walls, and why she moved between lecture hall, union meeting and factory floor.
For a reader new to her, the classroom years explain why her essays address workers and students as much as other philosophers. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents her concepts under social-political philosophy, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics, and her early period is where the school and union years sit. Teaching, in other words, is part of how she did philosophy, not a detour from it.
Frequently asked questions
Where did Simone Weil teach?
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According to Encyclopedia.com, she taught at lycées in Le Puy, Auxerre, Roanne, Bourges and Saint-Quentin.
What subjects did she teach?
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Encyclopedia.com reports philosophy, Greek, Latin and art history at Le Puy, and the Stanford Encyclopedia describes her philosophy lectures at Roanne.
Why did her teaching career end?
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Encyclopedia.com says debilitating headaches compelled her to take a leave from her last post and that she never taught again.
Did she teach workers as well as schoolgirls?
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According to Encyclopedia.com, she lectured to miners at the Workers’ College in Saint-Étienne, and the Stanford Encyclopedia says she taught philosophy to workers’ groups outside her lycée duties.
Where can her lecture notes be found?
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites Lectures on Philosophy, assembled from a student’s notes at Roanne, as the source for her classroom teaching on knowledge and the senses.