Education & Society in Modern France Ils 219

W. R. Fraser, William Rae Fraser

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415177559
• eBook ISBN: 9781136269752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1998. This is Volume VI of twenty-eight in the Sociology of Education series. Post-war plans for the reshaping of the school system in France have succeeded and superseded each other with confusing rapidity. They reflect the vigorous attempts of intelligent Frenchmen to construct an educational system that will be adequate for the resurgent, industrial, prosperous, democratic country whose mission as a model of civilization and enlightenment they still proclaim. Despite these measures dissatisfaction with the school system, its syllabuses and its methods continue to be felt acutely, with the principles of reform have been lengthily debated by the various professional, social, political and religious groups in France. The resulting legislation has brought about changes with which nobody is content. A major purpose of this book has been to allow the various protagonists to speak for themselves.

Chapter XI

The Matrix

THERE are limits to the terms on which Frenchmen can unite. Between 1905 and 1940 a modus vivendi was worked out between those groups who had quarrelled over the dynasty, the powers of the Catholic hierarchy, and the authority of the army. But the balance of forces was variable and groups questioned each other’s trustworthiness. Not all Frenchmen accepted the Republic in its third form. Even words like ‘liberté’, had, and still have, different meanings for supporters of secular or Catholic schools. Thibaudet¹ likens the Radical-Socialist Party, with its anti-clerical mind, to a champion fighting bulldog trained to seize its canine opponents by the left hind leg but defeated by inability to adapt its tactics on meeting a three-legged adversary.

It may be, as one writer suggests,² that the French bourgeois understood the old quarrels and the disputed issues of the period from 1870 to 1905, but could not adapt to face the new problems of the twentieth century. Traditional concepts of liberty and of individual freedom of action in the economic sphere of activity proved inadequate. After serious disruptions at the turn of the century order had been achieved by the State, and the French bourgeois was content to maintain that order. Adaptation to the new forms of organization and to the new knowledge required by large-scale, internationally competitive industry was reluctant. The risk of dividing a nation at a time when unity is needed is still felt to be real, and the old unifying words and concepts have to be held on to. ‘Unity lies in adaptation to soil and culture,’³ and any far-reaching proposals for the reform of education threaten to expose disunity and to alter the content of culture.

The Fourth Republic inherited the stresses and strains of the Third and its educational institutions. ‘Three issues were involved simultaneously: The 18th-century conflict between rationalism and Catholicism, the 19th-century struggle of democracy against authoritarian government, and the 20th-century dispute between employer and employed.’⁴ New problems made it impossible for the old quarrels to remain quiescent, and for the old structures to persist. ‘If France were and were to remain a nation structured as in the nineteenth century, i.e. three-quarters rural, with intellectual, managerial needs representing two or three per cent of the population, the experience of the past would be conclusive and the question (of selection) would moreover be of secondary importance … If reasons of democratic equality alone had to be taken into account there would probably be as many disadvantages in changing a procedure which … satisfies the elementary sense of justice and which has for a long time assured economic balance and social order.

‘But such reasoning is based on false premises.

‘France no longer has the social and economic structure of the 19th century. … Her needs in intellectual man-power are already ten times greater than before 1914 and continue to grow. The managerial staff (technicians and executives) of an atomic centre is 40% of the whole personnel, whereas it is only 2% in a coal mine.’⁵ M. Cros goes on to argue in favour of basing education on the concept of promotion for all rather than of selection for the few, and this corresponds closely to the views contained in the introduction to the Billères bill,⁶ one of the aims of which was expressed as ‘general promotion adapted to the capacities of each individual’. Such a growth in secondary education can be accepted joyfully as a challenge, or it can be viewed with alarm. The latter reaction led to the rejection of M. Billères’ proposed intermediate or middle schools, and seems to have dominated the drafting of less radical reform measures introduced in January 1959. Their author, M. Berthoin, speaking of the large numbers of pupils reaching the age of secondary education wrote:⁷ ‘Our secondary education for example is being weakened and may even succumb under the plethora. While this wave has as yet only swept over the first two years, how can we accept the outlook of lycées soon to be submerged by a million pupils, of whom doubtless half would only have chosen to go there on the basis of a misconception of their true aptitudes?’

The cautious, conservative limitation of full secondary education so as to produce a restricted number of pupils of high quality is paralleled in the economic life of France. ‘The Frenchman felt himself to be more master of his life in the era of craftsmanship than he is in the era of large-scale industry. Hence a sentimental attitude with regard to the small enterprise, based on the family, an hereditary patrimony.’⁸ The tradition of family businesses, self-employment, small firms and high-quality production is giving way as enterprises grow to develop the Sahara and Algeria or to build great power stations involving enormous capital. Prestige is accorded to the engineers, the physicists and the large number of technicians needed to translate plans into operations; but the re-equipment of manpower is an uncomfortable process. ‘Each time France has found herself facing an important problem of technical re-equipment, she has backed away from the obstacle to clear it later either at the price of a revolution followed by a dictatorship, or by passing through a ruinous war.’⁹ Opposition to the Billères proposals seem to reflect resistance to the new national aims which give a modern interpretation to ‘prestige’, ‘culture’, and ‘social justice’, and which demand a larger number of technically equipped persons.

This resistance to demands presented by a modern national economy is expressed in educational circles as an objection to altering the selection procedure. M. Cros pleads for more instruction before any selecting is done, and M. Chateau states that the first thing to be done is to recruit the élites.¹⁰

The pressure to adopt the educational structures and techniques required by a new technology and new political forces has come upon Frenchmen who have not yet solved the nineteenth-century problem of achieving a tolerant relationship between church schools and state schools, and so we find, superimposed on this economic problem, the complication of a religious and cultural dilemma. ‘In religion the Frenchman is marked by Catholicism, i.e. by religious authority, with no tradition of individual moral responsibility and no education by the church in political liberty.’¹¹ The driving force of the secular schools came from a rival source. The fact is that it was from Protestantism that active aid of high calibre came to the Republic. Everybody knows that the organizers of primary education, Buisson, Pécaut, Paul Bert, and Steeg were Protestant.’¹² French democracy, writes André Siegfried,¹³ is founded on a double negative—no Church, no King. This antagonism has stamped the thought of secular Frenchmen with some of the characteristics of their opponents, and men who, in domestic affairs, seem thrifty, practical and pragmatic, express themselves on national issues in terms which are idealistic, universalist, and even sacerdotal. The absence of faith becomes a faith; threatened chaos is averted by a new order, that of reason and logic; and the international Church is replaced by the humanistic concept of the brotherhood of man.

There may also operate other antagonisms besides those mentioned by André Siegfried. Advocates of secondary education for all point to the numbers of students who attend University or College in the U.S.A., and of course the alternative to selective examinations is a period of guidance or orientation or counselling reminiscent of the American practice. One comes across resentment, expressed for example by M. Chateau¹⁴ as contempt for Anglo-Saxon researches into the transfer of learning, or for attempts to relate the school more closely with life.¹⁵ French school training has traditionally taught the pupil to remain detached, to reserve judgement, to analyse a situation and to describe it rationally rather than to become immersed in it and committed to reaction. So the power and commitment by which universal concepts are made operative may be weak in those who have been trained in scepticism, doubt and suspended judgement.

In the opinion of some of those Frenchmen who designed the school programmes there may even be no desire for action. The secular ‘culture générate’ is literary and speculative; training is designed to perfect reason.¹⁶ This primacy is now threatened by science and technology, by new classes whose studies are practical, by bridges between courses hitherto clearly distinct, by new doors of entry to science faculties and by new research doctorates. ‘A scientific culture is being mapped out.’ Resistance to the new blueprint comes from those who believe in the rational, the literary, and the verbal skills tested by competitive examination, dissertations and ‘explications de textes’.¹⁷ ‘Let us not limit our children to animal instruments alone,’ writes M. Chateau, ‘let us give them abundantly the rich food of the Word.’¹⁸ Here, obviously, is a University professor delivering the secular gospel of ‘culture générale’ from his ‘chaire’.

‘Social commitment—for which professional training prepares one—concludes education but is distinct from it. First must come the purely cultural training, paying as little as possible attention to the hour and the group. The school must turn its back on life. It is this training solely preoccupied with “culture generate” which alone can prepare for social commitment. … To say that is to say several things. First of all it means considering education as a detour by way of ideas, it means applying to it once again, the old Platonic allegory.’¹⁹ The shortage of engineers and teachers is not to be solved by ever more precocious recruitment. ‘Train cultivated young people capable of transferring quickly from one activity to another, capable of adapting quickly to a profession, and then you will have at your disposal a large population on whom you can draw.’

But society, as M. Hignette points out,²⁰ may stand in need of qualities not, in his opinion, cultivated and tested by the traditional lycée education; he mentions adaptability, realism and sociability. The competitive or ambitious element may in itself be indicative of a division in society. Henri Chatreix writes:²¹ ‘The absence of social ambition, in the current sense, is a striking characteristic of the proletarian class. “To make a career for oneself” is an expression which, for them, has no meaning. Studies, whatever lies beyond reading and writing, are quite often held to be an illusory luxury having no direct connection with a condition which demands only immediate remedies. Besides, the little proletarian sets the educator a living problem to which the official manuals, that speak only of The Child, have not given the key. He does not bring with him into our establishments a nature already partially trained for school by the family and by social habits. …’

The link with the arguments of Paul Fraisse is clear. M. Fraisse contended²² that reform was necessary because, among other reasons, the secondary schools of France catered, each in its type, for a social class, with the result that separation of classes was perpetuated and centrifugal tendencies in society were aggravated. To this sort of argument M. Chateau responds²³ with the statement that ‘the school is not designed with a view to the productivity of the group, nor even to its cohesion, it is designed for the integral development of each individual.’

Excluded by socio-economic factors, and by disinclination to compete on strange terms, from the culture dispensed by institutions that enjoy prestige and open the way to desirable employment, numbers of Frenchmen may have expressed their dissatisfaction with the structure of the Republic’s society by voting for the political Party which proposed the most radical reform. In the Fourth Republic the Communist Party, despite small membership, won enough support to become the largest single group of representatives in the Chamber of Deputies. Supporting socialist dissatisfaction with school organization, they proposed a school structure and a common curriculum that would certainly have altered beyond recognition the traditional secondary education of France. They would have opened the secondary schools to a larger number of pupils than could have profited from the theoretical, intellectual, bookish, linguistic instruction associated with the idea of ‘culture’.

To M. Chateau such propositions are misguided.²⁴ ‘No reform of education can give back to the University (sc. the State education system—W.R.F.) this calm and this confidence without which it cannot educate effectively. … It is a question of atmosphere rather than of structure.’ And he goes on to argue that problems of numbers²⁵ are more important than problems of methods. ‘But here too the great master of reform is the Minister of Finance.’ This is one of the few references in all this debate to the question of finance and of how to find the resources with which to carry out reforms. The Billères bill incorporated a financial section, on which the Assembly’s Finance Commission had not pronounced when the debate took place in July 1957. Neither side seemed disposed to claim that the country could not afford better education. The claim was for fair shares of any money that might be voted, rather than for economy. Eighteen months later, in January 1959, M. Berthoin defended his proposals, which did not include the building of intermediate schools, on grounds of economy; but in the light of the 1957 debate one wonders whether the argument about shares was one in which M. Berthoin did not wish to involve himself.

Writing of the English tradition in public affairs, Sir Fred Clarke says:²⁶ ‘A second feature of the tradition is that it is not dominantly intellectual or “rationalist” … Just as this feature might be termed, in Mendelian language, a “dominant” character, so here too there is a “recessive” or minority character to set against it. This rationalistic, more intellectual strain, relatively quiescent in peaceful times, may come into strong action in times of ferment.’ If we reverse the terms, the same sort of analysis might be true of France. There is a pragmatic streak in French modes of thought as well as the frequently dominant rationalist, universalist tradition. And when the latter mode provokes disputes of revolutionary or disruptive dimensions, politicians may fall back on the less ambitious practice which threatens no institutions, and provokes no philosophical debate.

Even Langevin recognized limits to the implementation of his Commiss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• I. The Education System and Attempts to Reform It
• II. Educational Planning and Centralization
• III. The Administrative Obstacle
• IV. The Professional Obstacle
• V. The Cultural Obstacle
• VI. Social Justice and the Recruitment of Élites
• VII. The Religious Obstacle
• VIII. The Political Obstacle
• IX. Debate: Speeches and Documents
• X. Finance: a Bone of Contention
• XI. The Matrix
• Selected Bibliography
• Index