Education in France

Continuity and Change in the Mitterrand Years 1981-1995

Anne Corbett, Bob Moon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415112383
• eBook ISBN: 9781134831494
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In common with most industrialised countries, France has undertaken an ambitious programme of education reform over the last fifteen years. This book uses key extracts from contemporary writing to examine exactly how and why that process has happened, focusing on all stages of the education system. Sections cover the main characteristics of school reform in France, its aims and objectives, a discussion of the desirability of and politics surrounding the reform process, and explorations of classroom practice, the changing role of parents, standards in schools, and the curriculum. Because of its high quality, wide and up-to-date coverage of the area, this book will be a vital reference text for all those working in this field.

Part I
Context

1 Introduction

At a time when François Mitterrand was already the obvious challenger to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing for the French presidency, they had a great battle on the importance of history in the school curriculum. Giscard, passionately committed to modernizing France, had backed a plan to diminish the place of history. Mitterrand memorably proclaimed that ‘a nation which forgets its history forgets itself.’

The period, as later sections show, is clearly marked by the president’s recognition that he was above party but not necessarily above a highly personal reaction. When it came to the plan to reform the public system of education by taking over control of the Catholic sector, Mitterrand listened to the French as a whole (Favier and Martin-Rolland 1991). Mitterrand was not an obvious enthusiast for the Rocard government’s priority for education in 1988. But the educational intervention to which Mitterrand, as president, gave great significance was his welcome for a report on the crucial nature of history teaching (Corbett 1987). Mitterrand might have been the leader of a party with reformist—if not revolutionary—roots. He was also, and more importantly, a president with a profound historical culture, able to underline that the French do not regard change as necessarily a good thing when the defence of values is at stake.

But no nation is an island, least of all France, so conscious of its place at one of the great crossroads of European geography and history.

Anne Corbett’s chapter reflects on a personal experience in the public sector which provided many of the benefits outsiders think accrue to the French system while knowing that the experts were worrying about internationally common problems: a significant degree of failure, made all the more serious since, in general, standards were rising—the deficiencies of vocational education, the inflation of diplomas, the recruitment and training of teachers, the lack of lifelong learning, and problems of management and the share-out of responsibilities between central government, intermediary body and school (Durand-Prinborgne 1991).

René Mabit looks forward to the year 2010. Whether France and other European nations wish it or not, the period is bound to see Europe impinging more and more on schools. When ‘even the simplest calculation will show that education and training policies only begin to bear fruit after one or two decades and that they then influence economic and social directions for nearly half a century’ (Lesourne 1988), the European nations which are members of the European Union have a choice. They can accept what comes to them. Or they can develop a strategy for making the most of the new context. With the cultural commitment to the long view which marks the French nation, it is not surprising that there is always some commission developing strategies. The French Commissariat du Plan, where Mabit works, may no longer have the force it had under the Fourth Republic. But with an input from all those the French call ‘the social partners’ its think-tank function remains important.

References

Corbett, A. (1987) ‘Why history can never be debunked’, in A.Corbett and P. Gruson (eds) ‘The French national curriculum’, Times Educational Supplement, 6 March.

Durand-Prinborgne, C. (1991) ‘Le Système éducatif’, Cahiers français 249 (La Documentation française).

Favier, P. and Martin-Rolland, M. (1991) La Décennie Mitterrand, Vol. 2, Les Epreuves, Paris: Editions du Seuil, pp. 96–151.

Lesourne, J. (1988) ‘Education et société, les défis de l’an 2000’, La Découverte/Le Monde.

1 Secular, free and compulsory
Republican values in French education

Anne Corbett

THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL

Everyone knows the story of the French Minister of Education looking at his watch at three o’clock on a Monday afternoon and saying to a visitor: ‘At this moment pupils in year five in every French school will be studying Racine’. This story, or something like it, is generally told by outsiders to illustrate the appalling rigidity of the French system. But there is another interpretation. Whether or not the story is true it represents a certain ideal: that of a system which was uniform because governments of the time thought that was the route to equal opportunity by way of a meritocracy.

From this perspective the minister who expected an identical national curriculum to be taught to every child throughout France, regardless of social class and geography, can be seen as part and parcel of the French Republican tradition which even today puts education as the first of national priorities, with a crucial role not only in transmitting knowledge but in giving a sense of being French.

In the chapters that follow, the achievements and the challenges of the French education system are examined in detail and from very different perspectives. The challenges are numerous. To quote one well-known guide,¹ they include school failure—the more evident in a system in which more and more succeed—the problems of mass education, the problems of directing pupils along the most appropriate educational path, the difficulty of getting them on to the job market, the deficiencies of vocational education, the inflation of diplomas, the recruitment and training of teachers, decentralization and a new share-out of responsibilities, the lack of education and training for adults and the nature of the secular system, all in a new Europe in which there are strong pressures for convergence.

There is no denying the pertinence of these issues. Most are familiar elsewhere. But out of context the French resonance is lost. So I have accepted the challenge of Bob Moon to use the mirror of personal and professional experience to reflect the underlying cultural continuities in France in order to see how the French system has fared over the last two decades under such pressures as recession, a now multi-cultural society, new technology and changed production methods. French education by tradition is both élitist and Utopian: has it changed? has it conserved its ideals?

‘[Education] contributes to the equality of opportunity’, says the first article of the 1989 Act which governs the system. Its fundamental mission is the transmission of knowledge and the upbringing of future workers, says the Act’s explanatory note, as well as bringing up its future citizens.² Rare is the French minister who does not go on record to say that school is the place in which national ideals of citizenship are laid down which go beyond the rights of the individual. ‘The nation…is a community with a shared destiny…the school is a place of education and of integration in which those within it learn to live together in mutual respect.’³

In other words, school in France is still seen as the instrument by which, above all, the State guarantees respect for the basic principles of equality and secularity. In the nineteenth century, the State’s strong role was justified by the philosopher Lamennais: ‘Between the strong and the weak it is liberty which oppresses, the law which liberates’, the logic of which is a concept of the State as representing ‘Us’ rather than ‘Them’.

It follows that the State should define a national curriculum, manage a national exam, approve university diplomas on a national base, train and pay a national teaching force in the name of all its citizens.

But things are changing. In 1994 when the French government agreed to submit its education system to the OECD for examination, it did maintain that a combination of ‘accelerating technological progress …economic and social change…the better understanding that in an inegalitarian society uniform standards merely reproduce social, cultural and academic inequalities…decentralization and deconcentration …changes in mentalities at the grassroots…’ all mean that classic patterns of administrative action aiming at uniformity are ‘seriously compromised’.⁴

The ministry believed that the crucial question for those with responsibility for education has become how to ‘ensure coherence in a situation of greater individual autonomy’. Thus a system based on ‘formal equality of standards of measurement consistent with the principle of equal opportunity’ had to evolve.⁵

The legacy of Jules Ferry

It looked as if the French government—though not necessarily teachers and pupils—had crossed a conceptual barrier in favour of diversity during these Mitterrand years. But both Bob Moon and I can testify, on the basis of very different professional and personal experiences, that the philosophy of unity and equality has continued to have a real impact on daily lives.

He has seen French education refracted over quarter of a century by marriage into a French family and continuous experience of one French village. The boy with whom he played boules has turned into a powerful vigneron. The Algerian labourer has three daughters who have done the baccalauréat exam, the passport to higher education. It is no empty phrase that a mass education system exists to 18 or 20, or that it is a democratic right. The vast majority of the young believe in education as an essential stepping stone to a place in society. They not only know first-hand that if they leave school at 16 and unqualified, they are marginalized. They believe in becoming educationally competent.

This is country France. Here are shades of a structure which, in Eugen Weber’s memorable phrase, turned ‘peasants into Frenchmen’.⁶ The provinces still live with the inheritance of the Ecole des Garçons and the Ecole des Filles in each village, those elementary schools built with pride by each commune at the end of the nineteenth century, and associated with the name of Jules Ferry.

Ferry’s name is attached to a series of Acts of 1879–86 which made education laïque, gratuite et obligatoire—secular, compulsory and free. The elementary school, designed to provide a complete education for the peuple,⁷ was amazingly successful in instilling both skills and values. The village teacher, the instituteur, l’instit, goes down in French tradition as the representative of enlightenment and democracy. In some cases he or she was to be set against the sworn enemy, the curé, as told in Clochemerle,⁸ that 1923 classic of France’s most anti-clerical years. But regardless of the Church-State battles, it is clear that national respect for education has been intrinsically bound to rural France’s admiration and affection for its instituteurs and institutrices.

But there is another educational tradition in France, that of the Napoleonic lycées. It is a tradition that I have lived intensely, if vicariously, through friends of my generation, and also as a parent d’élève over the period covered by this book. Being at one point a chargée de cours (a part-time university teacher) has added to the experience.

The lycées were set up in Paris and the big cities during the nineteenth century to prepare their pupils for higher education and provide the State with its élite. As with the elementary schools they provided a complete education for their chosen pupils. In the case of the lycées the youngest pupils started in a petite or preparatory section; others were taken in en route. I feel I know these lycées since in the 1950s and early 1960s they have educated some of my closest French friends. This group did not get to the lycée as part of the bourgeoisie but because they were clever. I think, in particular, of a refugee from Nasser’s Cairo, another whose parents fled the Armenian genocide, and a third-generation Russian, as typifying what it is to be French: taking a meritocratic route to integration. (France has traditionally been a country of immigration. One-quarter of all French citizens have a foreign-born parent or grandparent.)

When these élite girls did badly their teachers threw their exercise books on the floor and cried La pauvre France! When they did well they got national glory. Their name was in Le Monde at the time of a national prize-giving— one of my friends scooped both the English and the French awards of her year. As they tell the story of their lives in their single-sex Paris schools, nonconformity was gently predictable. They would try to bluff their way through clothes inspections designed to detect non-regulation-length skirts. The height of daring was to drink a diabolo menthe (a mint-flavoured soft drink) with a boy in a Quartier Latin café.

But work had the priority. At a time when the multi-subject bac was open to a mere 10 per cent of the age group, the destiny traced out for these girls took baccalauréat success for granted. They would then go through the first stage of grooming f...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• SERIES INTRODUCTION
• PREFACE
• SOURCES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I: CONTEXT
• PART II: AIMS
• PART III: ACTORS
• PART IV: STRUCTURES
• PART V: VALUES
• APPENDIX I
• GLOSSARY