By PETER GUMBEL / Paris Monday, Oct. 04, 2010
French lessons Originally
designed to level out class differences, France's education
system instead perpetuates them
CLAUDINE DOURY / AGENCE VU / AURORA PHOTOS
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 baccalauréat 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?" (See the 25 best back-to-school gadgets.)
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. (See pictures inside a public boarding school.)
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 égalité, 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.(See pictures of schoolchildren in Detroit.)
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.
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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 Allègre, 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, Allègre 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. (See pictures of Sarkozy's visit to the U.S.)
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."(See pictures of a Mandarin school in Minneapolis.)
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 Molière.
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.(See pictures inside a school for autistic children.)
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 Nîmes, 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 Achève Bien les Ecoliers, published by Grasset, is out now
Read more
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 Allègre, 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, Allègre 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. (See pictures of Sarkozy's visit to the U.S.)
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."(See pictures of a Mandarin school in Minneapolis.)
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 Molière.
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.(See pictures inside a school for autistic children.)
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 Nîmes, 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 Achève Bien les Ecoliers, published by Grasset, is out now
Read more
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