France's Hushed-Up School Crisis

...Its goals were twofold: to wrestpoorfamilies' children from the hold of the Catholic Church, and to weld France's regions into a nation by imposing a national curriculum with a heavy stress on language, history and geography...

...Most teachers were men until World War I; Madame l'institutrice, when there was one, taught the girls and tended to beMonsieur's wife (as in Alain-Fournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes) or a spinster...

...Perhaps the crudest illusion of égalité is the baccalauréat exam one must pass to receive a high-school diploma...

...Lionel Jospin, the current Prime Minister, whose Education Minister's latest security measures include allowing the police to intervene within school grounds at the request of the principal...

...Foremost among them is Marie-Danielle Pierrelée...

...In addition, as Thierry Desjardins, a senior editor at the conservative daily Le Fi garo, convincingly de monstrates in his excellently researched book, Le Scandale de I 'Education Nationale, the expansion of high school education— which is compulsory up to 16 but also embraces about 80 per cent of 18-year-olds—has resulted in the recruiting of many who would not have met the requirements in previous decades...

...Régis, a trainee in Toulouse, regrets that "we are taught next to nothing about child psychology and how to handle critical situations...

...They brought a secular outlook and the French language to church-dominated rural areas where Breton, Catalan, Corsican, or Basque were spoken and hardly anyone knew French...

...Instead, Jaffro and Rauzy show, teachers are invited to view "student violence as a form of expression, an invitation to respect, a desire for communication, a legitimate form of violence in response to the violence that the instititutions distill...

...At the same time, teachers are appointed by the ministry according to a seniority scale that assigns the inexperienced to the most difficult schools and moves senior teachers to relatively quieter, more respected ones...

...This, of course, does not enhance their image in the eyes of educated parents...

...Fortunately, more and more teachers are openly voicing their distress...

...Some principals have quietly been joining forces with teachers and parents to try out new approaches...

...The uniformity of Ferry's late 19th-century system, designed to offer the same education in Paris, Normandy and Corsica, is no longer suitable to the social and ethnic complexities of France...

...In his book, he describes colleagues whose main interest in life seems to be planning their next journey, and who cynically "scan" rather than read exam papers while spending as little time as possible preparing lessons...

...Yet Allègre continues to exhibit a Marxist planner's attitude toward education policy and is reluctant to publicly admit that not all schools, children and home cultures are alike...

...When such absurdities become dominant, the pendulum usually swings the other way and rigid rules are imposed from outside...

...Children in Algeria and colonial Africa were taught that they were descended from the Gauls...

...French history was likewise distorted to fit a nationalist outlook...

...The sense of mission was real, though, and over the years the children of immigrants from Spain, Poland and Italy were just as efficiently shaped into French citizens as the little Catalans and Alsatians...

...True, where teachers once wore dark coats and were feared and respected by pupils and parents alike, they now wear sweaters andjeans and are liable to be spat at, as Philippe Milner notes in A bas les élèves...

...The goal Jospin set in 1989, when he was Education Minister, was 80 per cent by 1999...

...According to Education Minister Claude Allègre, out of a total of 75,000 schools, "39 have been listed as seriously violent, and 300 as moderately violent...

...And when the Center-Left magazine Nouvel Observateur did run a cover story in the late 1980s on the violence that they increasingly had to cope with, the Socialist Education Minister at the time questioned the efficiency and emotional stability of those interviewed...

...Teachers keep schools open in urban areas where police, doctors and social workers fear to tread...

...In L'insurgée she describes various reforms she has introduced in successive schools that have combined ruthless discipline with encouraging students to set themselves attainment goals and to study at their own pace in small units...

...In schools at Créteil, near Paris, Montpellier, in the South, and Roubaix, in the North, to name just a few places, teachers— backed by worried parents—have gone on strike and occupied schools in protest against the violence that is victimizing their students and them...

...In Mémoires de Profs, abittersweet collection of teachers' best and worst moments (edited by William Reymond), André recalls the aura that surrounded the memory of his father, an instituteur who died while the son was still young...

...Most worrying of all, violence has become a way of life in many schools...

...Many were gauchiste students in the late 1960s and early '70s...

...The latter were viewed with suspicion by parents and priests, some of whom denounced them from the pulpit as "agents of Satan...

...Teachers were drilled to see themselves as hussars of the Republic, leading their young troops toward the twin citadels of enlightenment andpatriotism...

...The course of events has proved cruel to Jules Ferry's anticlerical dream of an all-secularpublic education system whose quality and dedication would drive the private schools to extinction...

...It will take more than that, though, to restore their confidence—not to mention that of parents and children—in French schools...

...With his ally the Mayor and arch rival the priest, he formed the trinity that ruled over village life...

...His name...

...This is no doubt true of many countries, but if people here are finding it difficult to come to terms with the decline, it is because the educational system is one of the historic pillars on which modern France is built...

...Several of the teachers at the Mantes-laJolie school where the 11 -year-old was injured blamed him, rather than his assailants, for having allowed himself to be terrorized and maintained that he was keen to earn a little pocket money...

...Marcel, a retired history teacher from Normandy, was the son of a poor tenant farmer and the youngest in a family of seven...

...Like universities and churches, schools had hitherto been considered police-free "sanctuaries" in France, and this medieval tradition still prevails among Left-wing Socialists and Communists who were shaped by the 1968 slogans that put the forces of law and order on the same footing as Hitler's SS...

...It found that during the 1998-99 academic year high school principals "reported on average 40,000 incidents a term," including 1,000 physical attacks and 1,750 cases of serious vandalism...

...Primary education became free, secular and compulsory in 1882, thanks to a law passedatthe instigation of then Prime Minister Jules Ferry...

...Too many teachers still expect to receive their instructions from the top...

...At the same time, their literacy enabled them to help mayors run local affairs...

...Marianne, an English teacher in Saint-Denis, another Paris suburb, says it has become virtually impossible to control the students: "If two of them start fighting in the yard and one of us steps forward to try and separate them, we are immediately surrounded by a hundred or so hostile teenagers...

...Around 62 per cent of 18-20-year-olds passed it last year (against 20 per cent 30 years ago...

...This time, Allègre has sent them a few policemen as well...

...This bilingualism of sorts greatly enhanced the prestige of Monsieur l'instituteur (as the primary school teacher is known...

...The paradox is that the Education Ministry subsidizes them generously, yet refuses to allow its own schools comparable flexibility...

...Today, 25 per cent of all 11 -15-year-olds attend private schools that are mostly owned by Catholic orders, but the teaching is pretty much nondenominational: Although they follow the national curriculum, their educational approaches vary and they have proved perceptive of shifting social and ethnic realities without slighting civic and ethical values...

...High unemployment has further fueled criticism of the civil service (most fonctionnaires are guaranteed a post until retirement), even if its security is what many parents dream of for their offspring...

...The village teacher cast an imposing shadow on society and earned his place in literature—in novels by Joseph Kessel, Marcel Pagnol and, more recently, Claire Chazal, a popular television anchorwoman...

...Apathy and old habits, she acknowledges, are hard to fight...

...Pierrelée was repeatedly reprimanded by school inspectors for taking too many initiatives...

...So it is hardly surprising that teachers here, like those elsewhere in Europe or America, tend to be looked down upon by more prosperous parents...

...The local dialect was forbidden in the classroom...

...Until the 1960s, the shrunken network of école des curés—schools run by Catholic orders—catered both to devout families and those whose kids had failed in the state schools...

...Those numbers do not tally with another survey the Minister quoted...

...Loss of respect has a good deal to do with money...

...Actually, there are a multitude of baccalauréat exams, from those in the humanities or sciences that lead on to higher education, to those that acknowledge more practical skills like hairdressing, mechanics or forestry...

...Their best teachers came from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, created during the Revolution...

...A Progressive Decline France's Hushed-Up School Crisis By Janice Valls-Russell Paris Time was when its schools, with their austere, barracks-like buildings, bare floorboards and darkcoated teachers, were the pride of France...

...Virtually everyone, from ministers down to the humblest farmhands, saw them as havens of learning and civic behavior, places that, true to the Republic's spirit of égalité and fraternité, opened the way to social betterment...

...The laid-back image of a job where long vacations make up for relatively low pay is caricatured by Milner...

...Several of his brothers and sisters became teachers too...

...They advocate a return to genuine learning—to literary texts, mathematical theorems, basic science—and doing away with the present predigested approach...

...No longer...

...Teachers, in whom a spirit of loyalty to their profession is instilled at their training colleges, hesitated themselves to talk about the difficulties they faced...

...At Mantes-la-Jolie, on the outskirts of Paris, in a high school its head describes as "normal," an 11 -year-old was recently pushed down a flight of stairs by three older boys and seriously injured, allegedly for refusing to do their homework...

...Official figures are hazy...

...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...Attempts to enforce these measures would merely speed up the middle-class drain...

...Middle-class families, he argues, should be obliged to send their children to the less desirable schools to ensure a social mix...

...Several have published articles and books in the past few months describing what is going on in their schools in an effort to understand what has gone wrong...

...We owe everything to our instituteur" he says...

...Clearly, there are no simple solutions to France's education problems...

...Be that as it may, it certainly seems more profitable and fun for seven-year-olds to leam one of Jean de La Fontaine's fables or read one of Charles Perrault's fairy tales rather than work their way through boring, abstruse schoolbooks...

...Centralization ensured that programs thought up in Paris were taught throughout the country—at the same hour of the same day, according to one Education Minister...

...when they were hurling insults at the "mandarins of learning," as they used to call their teachers, they were undermining their own faith in the jobs they would one day be holding...

...When they are lucky, children consider them pals, as in the popular television series L'instit (short for instituteur...

...Typically, though, he advocates nationwide measures imposed from the top, such as requiring teachers to spend longer hours in the schools and to live in the areas where they work...

...Today's French schools have brightlypainted classrooms and are connected to the Internet, yet they are not what they used to be...

...The present starting salary varies between $1,200 and $1,650 a month, depending on qualifications...

...That is about half what someone with a similar education can expect to earn in the private sector, and partly accounts for the fact that men are deserting the profession: A majority of teachers are now women...

...Time has similarly short-circuited his ideal of egalitarian uniformity...

...Until a couple of decades ago, he epitomized the social advancement that through his teaching he offered his pupils...

...State grants and scholarships enabled him to become a teacher...

...France's educational system is largely the product of deliberate, centralized planning...

...He bullied my father into sending us to school...

...Schools need to be allowed to experiment...

...But much of the old dedication is still there...

...It is not unusual for them to make spelling mistakes or give students wrong information...

...Philippe Meirieu, a special adviser of Allègre's, acknowledges the "ghettoization" of some schools...

...Regional uprisings that challenged the central authority, such as the Cathars' struggle in the 12th and 13th centuries against the combined forces of the monarchy and the papacy were passed over in silence...

...Transcendent truths, they feel, are inherently ethical and help young people internalize a civic outlook on life...

...Those parents who do not insult them come to them with problems that should normally be dealt with by social workers...

...Moral values, meanwhile, seem to have blurred...

...A growing number have agreed to be interviewed by the media...

...Only one youngster in 10, incidentally, leaves school with no qualification at all...

...Because the one recurring question is, how has all this come about...

...some admit that male students—and not only those with misogynist, Muslim backgrounds—openly challenge their authority...

...Security measures unveiled at the end of January are planned for 470 high schools, but representatives of teachers' unions say privately that at least twice as many schools need them...

...Until 1945, they charged tuition...

...Opinion polls carried out in recent years show that the students who make it to the country's most prestigious centers for higher education, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole Nationale d'Administration and Polytechnique, increasingly come from upper-middle-class families...

...Napoleon I was the first to break the Catholic orders' monopoly on education when he created secular state lycées, or high schools...

...they know them by their first names and address them in the familiar tu form— which, however, can also express contempt...

...More seriously, Milner suggests that the current lack of respect for teachers is to some extent their own doing...

...Junior teachers appear to be shaped less by ideology than by the obscure psychojargon of the self-styled "pedagogists" who control the training colleges and influence educational policy, as Laurent Jaffro and Jean-Baptiste Rauzy, two lecturers in philosophy, point out in L'Ecole dés?uvrée...

...Teachers used it to argue with parents who wanted to keep their children out of school to work on the farm...

...The decline in discipline has been progressive, but it was long kept hushed, generally by school principals and the Education Ministry...

...In Jaffro and Rauzy's view, that will not improve the dismal situation...

...Teachers have never been well paid in France, but up to World War II, they were often the only people in their village with a regular income...