THE SCHOOLS OF FRANCE
By JUDITH HUBBACK Paris IT has been fashionable for many years among francophile Britons to assume that the standard of education in France is higher than it is north of the„.Channel. Short of a detailed comparative study which has yet to be made, I think it is impossible to lay down the law, because so much depends on personal factors and the classes, types and districts best known to those expressing an opinion. I am certain, however, that most fruitful results would follow from more knowledge among the parents of both nations of what those on the other side of the Channel take for granted, and of what they wish to see reformed.
Most middle-class French parents .ask of the schools that they should teach their children a great in-1.1y facts and that they should get them through the baccalaureat. They do not, on the whole, expect the school to deal with the non-academic side of education. Working- class parents expect their children to pass the brevet, or certificat d'etuaes primaires, at the age of fourteen, after which they will go on to some sort of apprenticeship. Until recently there has been only an insignificant demand for a wider type of education ; but the upheaval of the war and the occupation led the French to question their assumptions and perhaps even to see themselves as others see them. Large numbers of French parents mind very much about their children's knowledge of their own language. They also mind about the child's place in class and whether he can work quickly and accurately. For over a generation now the sciences baccalaureat has officially been the equal of the classical one, but the prestige it enjoys is lower. French schools are more academic places than English ones, but for the average pupil the education given is too narrow, and this is to a great extent due to the parents.
Two apparently separate reforms have been set in motion since the liberation, but they have in reality one motive—the desire for an increase in real education as against mere instruction. These two reforms are the new classes in the lycies and the extra year between school and university. For many years before the war it had been appreciated that the type of teaching most common in the lycies was too scholarly and intellectual for the majority of pupils. The exacting school-leaving examination, the baccalaureat, taken in two parts at sixteen and seventeen, left many who passed and most who failed mentally exhausted and unimaginative. All lycie work was directed towards it, and with the abolition of fees in the lycies and the general democratic move in education reassessment was necessary. On the one hand was the ever-increasing demand by employers of all sorts that young entrants should have passed the baccalaureat, and on the other was the evident inability of large numbers of pupils to rise to the necessary level. In the attempt to solve these two problems a minor revolution has taken place.
Already before the war liberal ideas were spreading, and at some bides a determined effort was made to study the individual pupils' needs and abilities. The new methods are now sponsored and encouraged by the Ministry of Education, but no school is forced to adopt them. In a school where the head is willing to experiment the co-operating professors are all volunteers, and so are the pupils. The parents are drawn in by means of regular meetings with the staff where the new principles are explained, and they also contribute their impressions to the new periodicals on the subject. The appear- ance of the classrooms where the new methods are used is lively and attractive because the walls and shelves are covered with the children's work, which reaches a remarkable level of finish, in keeping with the French tradition of good workmanship and dislike of shoddiness. The atmosphere also is a great improvement on the old type, because the keynote to all the teaching has to be the active co-operation of the pupils.
The most un-French conception which has been incorporated in the new classes—there are just over 800 of them running in lycies all over France—is that not only the intellectual side of the child must be taken into account by the educator. Apologists of the classes say this is nothing new in French thought, pointing to Rabelais, .Montaigne and Rousseau to prove their point, but the fact is that the main stream of French education has left those three authors in a backwater, together with their sound psychology and their common-sense attitude to the young. Any pupil going through four years of the new type of classes has a very good chance of emerging as a more fully developed person, having had much more time for art, music, handwork, expeditions and other activities. The new pupils do not only sit and imbibe information ; they do things. The enormous activity which goes on in the classrooms and on the Saturday expeditions would be unmanageable by the professors if numbers were not kept down to twenty-five for each class. The high level of achievement and the quality of the teaching are, to a great extent, due to this fact alone.
The, work is regulated in the main by the official syllabuses for the baccalaureat, but an amount of adjustment has been found possible which amazes the traditionalists. Parents who desired reform in the interests of their overworked adolescent children had always assumed that nothing was possible because of that great bug- bear—les programmes. The experimentalists have taken the bull by the horns and cover les programmes by different routes, linking each year's work to one or more centres of interest and devising these according to the pupils' mental ages rather than to anything else. The liveliness which results is fascinating to watch and most cheering to everyone,. The local studies are enterprising and many- sided, bringing in the unintellectual pupils in a very satisfactory way. Those gifted artistically can link up their powers with the main stream of class-work. In the ncw classes the usual French love of competitive marking is reduced to a minimum ; the pupils at first find this very strange, and fail to do their best until they realise the improvement in atmosphere which results. This is one of the aspects of the new classes which is considered most fatal and wrong by the conservatives, who think parents want constant evidence, by means of marks, of *hat the children are achieving. With the help of school psychologists and meetings of everyone concerned an effort is made to direct each pupil towards the career for which he or she is best adapted.. This links up on the national scale with the Ministry's bureau which provides information on the chances in each profession, the training necessary, the openings in each district and anything else required.
In August, 1948, it became compulsory for all prospective university students to give an extra year to their work. Until then the possession of a PAccalaureat certificate was enough for entrance to the universities and to the other schools of advanced learning. Now students must pass a further examination, the first of which will be held this summer ; in the process they will be sifted, and not all will be able to go on with their studies. The purpose is two- fold—to reduce the excessive numbers of students (excessive in the light both of the future needs of the various professions and of the present numbers of university staff) and to raise their cultural level, an objectionable phrase perhaps, but one which represents reality. The students during this extra year are being weaned from the rigid methods of work they followed in order to pass the baccalaureat, and introduced to the unguided system common in the tutor-free university courses. They study the wide principles of their own subjects and general French. They chiefly delight in not working to any set curriculum, and each professor is evolving his own courses. But the lengthened period of higher education is costly to the individual and to the State and undemocratic in some of its effects.
An English critic can hardly fail to be impressed by the present attempts to liberalise-education. A movement which aims at develop- ing qualities of character—independence of mind, enterprise, self- reliance and many-sidedness—fitted on to an admirable frame- work of academic achievement Is bound to have important results. It must be seen also in the post-war and post-liberation atmosphere —the necessity for economy and the desire to rebuild, the attempt to cull successful ideas from other nations with whom the French came closely into touch during the War, together with an undiminished conviction of knowing their own needs and the best means of meet- ing them. Love of formalism is giving way in the face of increasing knowledge of the nature of children. Wars, as revolutions, have almost all led to educational changes ; trends which were only just discernible before are deepened and grow more evident. There is an educational renaissance going on in France today.
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