2010-11-02 04:46:02
By PETER GUMBEL / Paris Monday, Oct. 04, 2010
French lessons Originally 
designed to level out class differences, France's
education 
system instead perpetuates them
Every June, toward the end of the school year, a ritual takes place in France
that speaks volumes about a nation that is both passionately proud of its
education system and, at the same time, deeply worried about why it has gone so
awry. It is the publication, in most national newspapers and on dozens of
websites, of the questions posed in the philosophy paper that, by tradition,
kicks off the baccalaur at school-leaving exams.
In most countries, philosophy isn't a subject taught in secondary school at
all, and even where it is, it tends to be taught as a history of thought,
rather than as a discipline to be practiced and perfected. But in France, the
land of Pascal, Voltaire and Descartes, philosophy is an integral part of the
national school curriculum, and a compulsory subject for the 650,000 students
ages 17 and 18 who every year sit the bac. The paper they must take is no
SAT-like multiple-choice exercise: the students are required to write
well-structured, clearly argued essays that refer to the ideas of past thinkers
to bolster their own case. This year's questions included, "Is it the role of
historians to judge?" "Should one forget the past in order to construct a
future?" and "Can art dispense with rules?"
At a time when nations including the U.S. and Britain have made a priority of
fixing their school systems, this French way of doing things could, in an ideal
world, be a model. Anchored at the heart of French education are two notions
that have become the mainstay demands of reformers elsewhere: the importance of
setting high educational standards through a national curriculum and the
enforcement of those standards through rigorous testing. Indeed, as part of his
Race to the Top campaign to fix failing schools, U.S. Education Secretary Arne
Duncan has already persuaded more than two dozen U.S. states to back a national
curriculum for subjects including English and math.
But if France, with its high national standards, is a model at all, it turns
out to be a severely dysfunctional one and nobody is more worried about that
than the French themselves, who until recently used to boast about having the
best educational system in the world. One of France's great strengths is that,
unlike the U.S. or Britain, the best schools are public rather than private.
That has spawned a tradition of meritocracy under which, in theory, any child
from any background, rich or poor, can propel themselves into the elite of
society by sheer intellectual prowess.
But while they have been good at producing a relatively small number of
extremely bright students who go on to run the country a vestige of the
system's elitism that dates back to Napoleon French schools are increasingly
failing to cater to the much larger number of students who have less stellar
abilities. A big surge over the past two decades in the number of adolescents
staying on until the end of secondary school has made those failings
increasingly apparent, as a slew of official reports has recently highlighted.
Among the findings: one-fifth of 11-year-olds finishing primary school still
have serious difficulty with reading and writing. By the age of 16, almost as
many about 18% leave school with no formal qualifications whatsoever. In
international comparative tests of 15-year-olds, France's overall scores are at
best mediocre and have been dropping abruptly in the past decade. Even at the
top end, the proportion of brightest kids is lower than it is in many other
countries, especially Finland. Most shocking of all, for a nation reared on the
concept of galit , is that school in France isn't the great leveler it was
supposed to be, but actually perpetuates social differences. Increasingly it is
a place where children from poor backgrounds do far worse than kids from
better-off backgrounds. An analysis by McKinsey & Co. shows that the
performance of French schoolkids can vary widely depending on their
socioeconomic background: especially in math, race and class affect scores even
more markedly than they do in the U.S., where the gulf between white, black and
Hispanic students has been widely documented.
In a scathing report earlier this year, the Cour des Comptes, the French
equivalent of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, noted that the annual
budget for education makes it the single largest area of government spending,
ahead even of defense. Yet, said the report, the system is failing many of the
10 million children in its care: "The large number of young people with major
problems at school shows that the educational system as it's constituted today
isn't capable of responding to their needs."
Even that much-vaunted philosophy paper has its dark side. An official analysis
of the results over the past few years shows that it's the exam for which
French students get by far the worst marks, with the average being a failing
grade. That in turn has led to a backlash. Student magazine L'Etudiant this
summer published a revealing test: it asked 10 philosophy professors to mark
the same essay. The wide range of marks that came back, from convincing pass to
dismal failure, sparked a storm of controversy, prompting L'Etudiant to call
the exam a "lottery," a description quickly picked up by national media.
All Work and No Play
What's gone wrong? It's a question the French themselves are agonizing over.
Typically, much of the debate is theoretical, and there's no sign of a national
consensus emerging. France is broadly divided into two camps: traditionalists
who blame the troubles on a drop in standards and want to reinforce academic
discipline, and reformers who believe that the standard setters and teachers
themselves must take children's needs more clearly into account. Neither side
has much love for the huge national bureaucracy that maintains oversight over
schools, a monolith employing more than 1 million people, of which 200,000 are
not teachers, and micromanages to an astonishing degree what's taught and how
in every classroom in the country. For example, all French 13-year-olds this
month are learning how to multiply and divide relative numbers, like (-7) x
(-25) divided by (+5), and to identify, in grammar, circumstantial participles
functioning as temporal clauses. (Don't ask.)
There have been numerous attempts to slim down and streamline this apparatus,
but none has been able to bring about more than cosmetic change. The biggest
recent showdown came in the late 1990s, when then Education Minister Claude All
gre, a socialist, branded the educational establishment "a mammoth" and vowed
to cut it back. After mass street protests against his plans brought the
country to a halt, All gre got the chop. Since then his successors have been
far more cautious in their reform efforts. President Nicolas Sarkozy has stayed
clear of substantive educational reform since being elected in 2007.
One issue that's rarely addressed in the national debate about education is a
factor that is immediately apparent to any foreigner coming into contact with
the French school system: the unforgiving classroom culture that continues to
hold sway in most schools. The emphasis is so heavily placed on the
transmission of knowledge that basic pedagogical notions like motivating
students to perform well are given short shrift.
The marking system is by tradition skewed so that it's all but impossible to
get top marks, 19 or 20 out of 20, especially for a liberal-arts subject. (12
is a "good" mark for a philosophy paper.) And traditional practices that are on
the wane elsewhere still hold strong in France. One is grade repetition:
according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
requiring students to repeat a year is a rarity in Asia, Scandinavia and
Eastern Europe, and it's no longer all that widespread in the U.S. or Britain.
Numerous studies from around the world demonstrate that grade repetition
doesn't usually help students perform better and often has the opposite effect,
demoralizing and stigmatizing them as failures. Overall, the OECD estimates
that about 13% of students in its 30 member countries repeat a class. In
France, more than 38% of students repeat a grade, three times that average, the
OECD says, and some French studies put the number even higher.(Read how German
homeschoolers won asylum in the U.S.)
The impact of this forbidding classroom culture is manifested in international
surveys of how schoolchildren feel and behave. Compared with their peers
elsewhere, French adolescents tend to have relatively low self-confidence and
are particularly nervous about making mistakes. One study, by the International
Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, tested the reading
abilities of 10-year-olds from 45 countries and then asked the children how
well they thought they read. The French kids performed reasonably well in the
test, reading about as fluently as most of their peers in Europe. But when
asked to judge their own ability, they put themselves near the bottom of the
pile, only just above children from Indonesia and South Africa, where
illiteracy remains widespread.
International education experts throw up their hands at all this. Andreas
Schleicher, head of the OECD's educational division, says France still uses
"19th century industrial methods" in the classroom, by which he means teachers
are reduced to factory-line workers who must carry out orders rather than be
trusted to use their intelligence and training. Hans Henrik Knoop, a Danish
psychologist at the University of Aarhus who specializes in education, concurs.
He says French teaching methods are "an extreme example" of lingering 19th
century practices and calls them "pedagogically catastrophic."
What's sorely missing is any sense of fun. Unlike in the U.S., school in France
provides almost no nonacademic activities to compensate for brainy classroom
work. Sports, music and art are afterthoughts, with little or no time devoted
to them in the national curriculum; if you want to play soccer or the violin,
the thinking goes, you can do that on your own time. But without sports teams
or school orchestras, there's little that binds adolescents to their schools.
That's clear from the way schools are depicted in popular culture. In France,
there's nothing remotely comparable to upbeat movies like High School Musical.
One of the few successful recent films about school in France, Skirt Day, stars
Isabelle Adjani as a stressed-out teacher who finds a pistol in a student's
backpack and uses it to take her unruly class hostage. Only through armed
intimidation can she get the class's attention for her lesson on Moli re.
Hard Lesson to Learn
Given the poor and worsening results of the education system, pressure is
inevitably building for change. It's coming from above, from policymakers and
other authorities, including the Cour des Comptes. So far, it hasn't been a top
priority for Sarkozy, who is all too aware of the dangers of attacking the
conservative school establishment; over the past 15 years, reform attempt after
reform attempt has failed, after provoking the ire of teacher unions and pupils
alike. Still, Luc Chatel, the current Minister of Education the 29th in 52
years has been cautiously trying to peel back the layers of bureaucracy and,
in a series of pilot projects, give schools a touch more autonomy to manage
their affairs. It's too early to say what the results will be. So far, the
political backlash has been contained.
But criticism also comes from below, from teachers and parents. One of the
nation's top colleges, Paris' Sciences Po, is in the vanguard of change: a few
years ago, it changed its entry procedures to allow in bright kids from
troubled inner-city schools who don't have great grades at school but are
judged as having great potential. That policy, spearheaded by Sciences Po's
director Richard Descoings, remains highly controversial. And, as Paul Robert
discovered to his cost a year ago, further down in the trenches of the school
system, the battles can be just as rude.
The director of a middle school near N mes, Robert tried to bring about a
cultural revolution there, including refusing to force students to repeat
grades. It backfired: he set off a full-blown teacher revolt and was quickly
shifted to another establishment. France is a nation with a storied tradition
of thinkers about education, he reflects bitterly, but one that "hasn't
succeeded in irrigating the country" when it comes to changing current
practices.
He's right: philosophy can be dazzling, but even in France it isn't nearly
enough to guarantee good schooling and that should give educational reformers
in the rest of the world pause for thought.
Gumbel's book on French schools, On Ach ve Bien les Ecoliers, published by
Grasset, is out now.