In the hustle that is America’s economic and cultural hard drive, perhaps no intellectual pursuit is deemed as useless as the study of philosophy. The French beg to differ.

The New York Times recently reported on a longstanding annual rite of passage for that nation’s high school seniors: a four-hour written exam in philosophy in which 500,000 17- and 18-year-olds must answer one of two deep questions, or discourse on a work of philosophy. (This year’s selection came from Nietzsche’s 1878 book “Human, All Too Human.”)

The exam, which is given at the same time each year around the country, is the culmination of a mandatory year-long course in philosophy from which only those in vocational programs are exempt.

 The idea, which doesn’t sound like a bad one at all to us, is “that you have to go through this collective reflection on values — on justice, on freedom, on what is a state, on democracy — in order to become a good citizen,” according to Anne-Sophie Moreau, an editor of Philosophie Magazine. Lord knows, we all need more good and thoughtful citizens.

Wrestling with life’s big questions — such as this year’s “Can one be happy when others are not?” — would also seem to appeal to the speculative mind of the late adolescent, who may also find reassurance in the knowledge that the moral issues that trouble him or her have perplexed people for millennia. And really, who wouldn’t profit from tearing themselves away from their phone for a while to reflect on the meaning of truth, or on the nature of happiness?

The French take these matters seriously. The Times reports that local news outlets commit live-blogs to the exam and philosophers are invited to discuss on radio and television and in newspapers their own responses to the questions posed. The philosophy course is generally regarded as the most rigorous of the students’ final year of secondary education, and adults still remember how they scored on the exam years later. 

To many Americans, who tend to prize practical and technical knowledge above other kinds, a mandatory course in philosophy for all high school seniors would seem a bizarre use of educational resources in the scramble to prepare young people for the job market. 

But philosophy does have relevance. A recent essay in the Times by David Lay Williams, a scholar of political thought at DePaul University, focused on Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire and Plato’s discussion of the dangers of extreme inequality of wealth. According to Williams, the ancient Greek philosopher argued that in a thriving republic, anyone who accumulated more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens should donate the excess to the state. Plato thought insatiable greed was a sickness of the soul. If he was right, Musk’s soul is in mortal danger: His net worth has been calculated to be five million times as large as that of the average American family.

But the point of exposing young French people to philosophy, one teacher said, is not just to learn its historical theories. “What counts most is an individual’s capacity to understand and grasp ideas,” he said.

This put us in mind of another Frenchman, the 19th-century novelist Alexandre Dumas. One of the characters in the “Count of Monte Cristo” says, “Learning does not make one learned: There are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory; the second, philosophy.”

 Substitute “the internet” for “memory,” and the point still holds.