What’s your opinion about the culture of teaching and learning in French schools generally?
Generally speaking teaching and learning are quite academic in French schools. In the country of Freinet, who founded the active pedagogy, teachers speak and pupils write most of the time. That’s quite amazing for young Finns who have to study in France for a while! How can we explain that?
There is a strong stream of writers for whom pedagogy is not only of no value for teaching but responsible of the bad results of French school. They use to vilify pedagogical writers in a way quite incredible abroad, putting the blame on them for advocating that you can’t teach someone if he doesn’t want to learn (Philippe Meirieu for example) so the best you can do is to create the desire to learn by appropriate methods.
During the last two decades of the XXth century the upholders of active pedagogy have been in favor and tried to introduce some changes in the curricula and in the processes, but the victory of the right wing in 2002 has brought about the end of these attempts. All this pedagogical fantasy has been disdainfully left on the side of the road in favor of basic literacy and numeracy in primary schools, taught in a quite traditional way, and in lower secondary schools the emblem of the pedagogical errors, IDD (= “paths towards discovery”) has been marginalized in a quite strange, but typically French way: the means to realize IDD are still given by the government but you can hardly find for years a single line about them among the huge amount of official texts on education. And the last drastic cuts leave no other alternatives for headmasters than using the means for IDD to maintain some specific helps for low achievers for example. Of course teachers training has followed the same reactionary way. The institutes for teachers training created 20 years ago by the leftist minister of Education Lionel Jospin has been recently marginalized and teachers are nowadays thrown with a full service in front of pupils without any professional experience. This so-called reform, let’s say destruction, of teachers training has been strongly criticized by most of authorized voices as jeopardizing the future of French education.
Would you tell me first hand about your experience in the school Peter Gumbel writes about in his book [1] ?
This is an old story I don’t like to remember! Basically I wanted to find a way of reducing grade repetition, which is a strong characteristic of French education. It costs 2 billion each year, it’s well established for a long time that it’s of no use for improving the pupils’ chances of success, but that it severely endangers them. But it’s still funded.
My reasoning was to offer low achievers, after the first grade of lower secondary school, a better path towards learning that would enable them to rejoin the main stream after one or two years, without having wasted their time and with a better self-esteem. I was full of hope that my idea would be welcomed by the regional education authority for I could easily demonstrate that it was quite less expensive (1 to 4) than grade repetition.
The second point was not to segregate the low achievers in special classes. There were mixed for approximately 2/3rd of their school time with mainstream pupils and were gathered for special teaching in Math, English and French, the subjects in which their difficulties were most penalizing.
The teachers were volunteers, the project has been accepted by the school board but the regional authority has never wanted to afford appropriate means. So as long as it could be done without extra hours it has been almost tolerated by the majority of the teachers, but when it was necessary to take a specific part of the budget for that there has been a big upheaval in the school. The leader claimed that this project was nonsense because one must not gather low achievers even part of their time, as the best thinkers use to say. He was followed by the most reactionary part of his colleagues who found that you have not to cut the means for the sole benefit of low achievers.
With time it became hard for me to maintain the project all the more since the local authority, which has never funded it, didn’t supported me really in the contest. So I had to give it up in spite of the good results for the pupils and of the high degree of satisfaction of the parents. Three years after, when I turn back to that period, I realize that I had to pay for the great love of the French for ideology (versus a form of pragmatism I tried to enhance): for the objective results in this affair were of no weight compared to eagerly clinging to ready for use thinking.
What needs to change in French schools, and what is the culture that resists change?
The most urgent measure would be to rebuild teachers training in an acceptable way, giving them on the one hand sufficient pedagogical basis and on the other hand a true professional experience before they take a full teaching service. It will not be so easy for the colleges which are now in charge of teachers training are not prepared for that. It’s not in their culture and they care naught for pedagogy!
The second measure would be to give schools real means for remediation. In spite of spin doctors of educational reaction, and in spite of my bad experience in my former school, I feel that the teachers’ mind has changed (generally speaking) and that they are more ready to consider that you have to give more or (I prefer) differently to low achievers. There are also good points in the 2005 laws (about education and about handicapped people). But there are no appropriate means to plan serious projects to reduce the number of pupil falling behind. It doesn’t mean, amidst bad economic conjuncture, that one has to increase indefinitely education expenditure but that one has to share differently the budget. Drastic reduction of grade repetition could represent a huge amount of money which could be better appropriated for other type of remediation.
The third measure would be to reconsider the curricula: we have now a kind of core curriculum which draws the main skills that all students must have acquired at the end of compulsory education, but the traditional syllabus are still in use and teachers (and inspectors) pay more attention to them than to the core curriculum no matter that hardly a third of all pupils have a good command of the syllabus at the end of lower secondary school!
The fourth measure would be to loosen the ties of pupils’ assessments: we are too keen on assessing pupils by marks which don’t give any real knowledge of their skills. If one wants to know (and make them know) what the pupils really are able to do in Math or French or whatsoever, one has first to explain clearly what the pupils are expected to do, and then to show them what they have managed to do and where they have to improve. It must be clearly established also that all pupils won’t be able to learn something at the same time. And they must be allowed to learn on their own rhythm. That’s the best way of preventing many from falling behind, to let them going ahead at their own pace. That’s also where the French culture is still reluctant: for we have been taught that if one gives all the pupils the same opportunity of learning it’s then their responsibility to do their best to achieve to learn, no regards for their proper conditions of life, their disabilities, the help they might have at home etc… As I’ve said teachers are slowly changing their mind on this important point, but whether this change concerns the majority of them I wouldn’t dare to assure.
Which new methods would you like to introduce?
Introducing changes in a school is a difficult thing when you’re headmaster in France, for you can’t rely on your own administrative authority which is quite light. Teachers are much more impressed by their inspectors (probably because they see them once every seventh year as an average) than by their headmaster whom they consider mostly as somebody who is in charge of making them apply government’s last measures. And as they know that these measures will probably be left aside a few years after, they are not very keen on putting them on. Of course if the headmaster desires to introduce some “extra” innovating measures of his own he will probably manage to convince a minority that it could do, but most of the staff will be at least reluctant or (more often) rebel. Add the unions favorite game (a lot of teachers unions syndicate a minority of them) of opposing every reform with no regards for its benefits for pupils and you will have the exact picture of this huge prehistoric animal unable to walk due to its own weight as some former leftist minister quite awkwardly dared to describe it… So the changes I’m trying currently to introduce in my school are quite tiny and shy.
Firstly to realize more mixed classes in spite of optional subjects which are usually a good subterfuge to make segregate classes. But I do have segregate classes for very low achievers pupils, and this is a very big problem I deal with daily.
Secondly I’ve pushed a whole team of teachers to experiment other way of assessing students without any mark. For the moment it do well, and I hope to extend this project to more classes next year.
Thirdly I’m trying to make equity a real concern for everybody in the whole life of school: for example school travels: we have plan this year all the travels abroad on the same week during which we are going to propose to all other pupils (the majority) different physical and cultural activities in order to make them experiment more exciting new activities than the dull daily life of school when you think of your fellow travelling away.
Fourthly I encourage teachers to consider every pupil as an individual instead of a theoretical clone of the ideal pupil they have dreamt when they began teaching. I dare say that we have made together some small progress in that direction.
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