French Education and Its Aborted Enlightenment

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David Rabadà

The French Revolution of the eighteenth century, aside from its well-documented penchant for severing heads, also ushered in a bold new educational vision, rooted firmly in Enlightenment ideals. At its heart lay the ambition that everyone should have access to basic culture and knowledge. Nowadays, France, the mother of it all, has suffered what can only be described as an educational miscarriage. Her revolutionary guillotine has symbolically castrated its once visionary Enlightenment.

France’s education system has largely abandoned the Enlightenment’s reverence for knowledge, effectively strangling the transmission of a shared cultural heritage to pupils nationwide. The potholes in its educational road have been so deep and numerous that the list of ministers promising to fix them rivals the tally of unkept political pledges. Each new minister, each new promise, has brought a further lowering of academic standards—all in the hope of inflating pass rates. The outcome, predictably, has been a general decline in educational rigour, masked by an artificial improvement in student grades. In short, as in Spain, France has managed the astonishing feat of producing fewer academic failures, higher grades, and yet ever lower levels of actual knowledge. That is: we Iberians and Gauls know less and less, score better and better, and yet see three times as many young people failing to complete secondary school on time. If the Enlightenment brought schooling for all, the reform has brought top marks for everyone.

One might ask how such a paradox has come to pass. The answer is disarmingly simple: French educational reform has followed a broader trend seen across Europe and North America, where governments—anxious not to alienate voters—have embraced a misguided “benevolence” in schools. To avoid upsetting parents, politicians hand out passes like sweets and eliminate the unpopular practice of making pupils repeat a year. They call it—without a hint of irony—equity and educational excellence. These terms were once enthusiastically parroted, for instance, by the former Catalan Minister of Education, the honourable Ernest Maragall—who, sadly, appeared not to grasp what they actually meant. Equity, after all, cannot mean abandoning the weaker pupils of a class or denying them the chance to repeat a year, as is now standard practice. The issue is not that a struggling pupil should repeat the exact same course, but that they should receive the support necessary to reach the average level of their peers.

The French educational reform of the twentieth century is similar—in both design and consequence—to those of its Western neighbours: Spain, Scotland, Quebec, Norway, Finland, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and others. The pedagogical shift involved replacing what worked in favour for what sounded appealing. Where once the system relied on subject experts to teach students, the new model turned everything upside down, placing students at the heart of the educational system. This sounds uplifting, but in practice it has pushed the knowledgeable teacher out of the spotlight. In other words, where the learned teacher once guided students through the acquisition of knowledge, students are now expected to learn on their own—often without access to a subject specialist. And we know full well that, without a significant base of prior knowledge, it is nearly impossible for a learner to discover everything independently. Try deriving the Theory of Relativity without a grasp of certain mathematical tools and tell me if we can really leave our pupils to their own devices, as the discovery-based, constructivist model and his learning by doing would have us believe.

In essence, we have shifted from a teacher-led model of instruction to a student-centred model of learning—something that sounds noble but conceals a quiet fraud. Today, the focus is no longer on the knowledge to be acquired, but on so-called competencies—a term invoked to justify preparing pupils for jobs that do not yet exist. This is a paradox in itself: if we do not know what the future holds, how can we prepare students by depriving them of the knowledge foundations that every future will require? Herein lies the abortion of the French Enlightenment: its present-day education.

France, in the 1990s, was among the global leaders in mathematics and science. Today, that belongs more to the realm of pedagogical mythology. And yet, despite the glaring failure, some pedagogues continue to call for further reductions in academic content, championing interdisciplinary “areas” or “transversal subjects”, whereby passing one domain—say, technology—magically translates into a pass in mathematics. One might fail six subjects, but a clever algorithm will still claim that all the requisite competencies have been met, and the pupil is ready to move on. Fortunately, this string of absurdities has reached such grotesque proportions that the French political class can no longer deny the obvious: stripping down content does not improve a serious educational system—it undermines it.

For this reason, the French Ministry of Education has pledged to raise academic standards, to restore the authority of teachers, and to return to teaching teams the right to decide on student retention. Teachers will once again be empowered to prescribe holiday work for those who have not met academic expectations. Standardised level assessments will be introduced for certification at key stages. And, crucially, only textbooks with demonstrable scientific validity will be officially recommended.

All that remains now is to hope that the Enlightenment may yet give birth, in its country of origin, to a healthy child free of deformities. The labour has begun; the delivery is yet to come.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons