We are reproducing here the article published in L'Express at the following address:https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/idees-et-debats/a-defaut-de-pouvoir-reformer-l-education-nationale-on-la-desagrege_2170226.html
[by Pierre Vermeren]
The policy pursued for five years in National Education has benefited from favorable circumstances: a good connoisseur of his ministry, a thoughtful reform program approved by the general public attached to the recovery of the school and the baccalaureate, five unprecedented years of continuity, and convictions about strengthening the weakened secular base of the school. But the headwinds blew: the yellow vests and the strikes prohibited any audacity, increasing the pressure on public finances - no salary increase for teachers despite a purchasing power halved in forty years -; finally, three school years damaged by Covid-19 have, from confinement to gagging of students, and weeks of alternating courses to reduction of programs, wrecked education, and led to distributing a complacent baccalaureate with almost no tests.
The ministry fought to keep schools open against the advocates of the continuous confinement of children. But the consequences will be profound for a generation of young French people. The proof is established by the subjects whose knowledge is cumulative. In mathematics, the level was already precarious before the crisis; it collapsed for the majority, causing despair among teachers. France, which needs engineers to reindustrialize, has been closing scientific preparatory classes for two years due to a lack of candidates at the level. The transformation of the country is threatened for years to come.
The paradox is therefore striking between the proclaimed salvific intentions and the distressing results. It raises the question of public action and its impotence in a society subject to powerful backlashes, which the return of war in Europe will not improve.
To listen to our leaders, society is partly responsible for the educational drift, because all French people want the baccalaureate for their children! It would therefore only be fair to give it to everyone without further ado, trampling on the knowledge formerly required of graduates. We do not know that in Switzerland and Germany, where the general baccalaureate continues to be the preserve of 20% to 40% of an age group, where unemployment is non-existent and where the industrial economy, based on apprenticeship, offers standards of living and prosperity much higher than ours, citizens are demanding the universality of theHigh SchoolIt is because the baccalaureate is dysfunctional, the production economy is shrinking, and we pay ourselves with titles that the disoriented French swear only by the illusory lifeline of the baccalaureate - even though selection is carried out in higher education by the humiliation and self-elimination of unfit students.
In a country and a society not devoid of collective intelligence, where hundreds of books and reports have diagnosed and dissected the ills of French national education and the means to remedy them, public powerlessness raises questions. Looking at the greedy advertisements of home or online course merchants, and of private schools and diplomas that flourish in the media for executives, we note that these developments that strip the French republican pact bare find supporters. Is it not reasonable to wonder if our commercial economic system, like the American one, is not demanding idiotic consumers with available brain time?
Although the Maghreb is of little interest to France, it is sometimes appropriate to look at what is happening there. These countries modeled their education systems on France after decolonization. The status of teachers has collapsed since the 1980s, in much more dramatic proportions than here; in Algeria, a lecturer earns less than 300 euros. Teaching and private lessons, business schools and the parallel circuit of private lessons have become in Morocco and then in its neighbors the darlings of the elites, then of the middle classes. The courses and success in exams, the content of which is less and less important - except for a few elitist courses - are now monetized by the teachers themselves. The more the public system collapses, the more private education and parallel monetary circuits take off. We are not there yet in France.
Let us question the promoters of the educational policies that have been conducted for twenty years in France, and the way in which they are linked together to lead to the current devaluation. Beyond the hackneyed debate on the decline in the level of students and teachers, let us note that French students, who are doing less and less scientific and literary studies at university, are increasingly reluctant to take the teaching exams. And a growing number of successful candidates are now resigning after a few months. It is to mask this disaster, which says a lot about the perception of the teaching profession and the conditions in which it is no longer possible to practice it in a growing number of establishments, that the ministry has reduced mathematics teaching in high schools, that it is recruiting teachers who act outside of competitions - or even skills - and that the State wants to eliminate the CAPES. Since teaching conditions discourage good will, let us pretend to ignore it and further degrade the public system - instead of questioning the objective causes which drive away those who could teach.
Such case law has already led, a few years ago, to lowering the recruitment conditions for students from disadvantaged high schools to enter the IEP in Paris. The ZEP stream, set up by the late Richard Descoings, gave rise to French-style positive discrimination. Presented as beneficial and generous, the initiative quickly produced effects that revealed its meaning. In ten years, the entrance exam for the IEPs has been dismantled. French public education, which is in a very poor state, is struggling to promote the best elements from the working classes. But instead of tackling its reform, the exams and their supposed discriminatory effect are being disqualified. The democratic achievements of the French Revolution, enshrined in the Thirde Republic, is presented as a tool of discrimination, even though it is the charlatanism of educational policies which led to the failure of which we are suffering the consequences.
Behind Nicolas Sarkozy's sally on The Princess of Cleves disqualified, there was the ENA graduate Richard Descoings, his advisor on educational matters. The same "Ritchie" and his doctrinaires have a lot of consistency in their ideas. The historian Laurent Bigorgne, his director of studies at the IEP, who became director of the liberal Institut Montaigne, followed in his footsteps, becoming an advisor to President Macron on educational matters. The disqualification of public competitions was their work. The abolition of the ENA masks that of written intellectual tests of knowledge at the entrance to the IEPs. It supports the offensive that has delegitimized general culture in the IEPs (symbolized by The Princess of Cleves), before attacking the baccalaureate, transformed into a distorted entrance exam - covid having accelerated its hollowing out in the American fashion. The men of the IEP twisted the Blanquer reform of the baccalaureate, devaluing the sciences - the scarcity of mathematics was doubled by the evanescence of the new physical and natural sciences -, which are of no interest to our Anglophiles mixed with economics from the IEP; as for history-geography, behind a thin patriotic screen, it has ceded positions to geopolitics and political sciences. So that the high school has partly mutated into a preparatory class for IEP, even though this sector, brought to the pinnacle in fifteen years by our Americanized bourgeoisie, only educates 0,45% of young French people.
This drift was preceded by the geo-politicization of history-geography in the competitive examinations for preparatory classes for business schools, and by the reduction in the attractiveness of these schools. Their high-level intellectual competitions can now be circumvented by parallel admissions, and dual degrees offered by the IEPs for a fee. The objective is to divert the best students from the Preparatory Classes for the Grandes Écoles, the trademark of the French elite, whether they are the former HEC preparatory classes or the Khâgnes, which have become, among other things, new channels for access to the IEPs.
Regarding the Blanquer reform of the baccalaureate, academics and agrégés have resisted by strengthening the literature, philosophy and humanities programs; but already, there is talk of closing the humanities stream, which annoys our doctrinaires. There is no doubt that the weakening of the Henry IV and Louis Legrand high schools - presented as a democratization operation - will further undermine CPGE and Grandes écoles. Because in the crosshairs, the objective is the French model of training elites. How can we put an end to its cumbersome revolutionary legacies, and Americanize it once and for all?
The destruction of the CAPES - while waiting for that of the aggregation which is consubstantially linked to it - is an important step in this process. This public policy initiated by the National Education will flourish under the next five-year term - Bruno Le Maire already says he is interested. After opening the rector positions to ENA graduates, the new target is the General Inspectorate, the main state body of the National Education, whose dismantling has been announced. In Higher Education, it is the turn of the National Council of Universities. Responsible for verifying the conformity of doctorates to disciplinary scientific canons, which has spared France the election of academics trained at a discount or co-opted by their friends - like Tariq Ramadan who had to leave for Switzerland to become a doctor before being elected in the United Kingdom - the CNU, entrusted to academics - like the late rectorates - is more than in the hot seat.
At the University, the offensive consists of undermining the recruitment and the bodies of lecturers and professors. In the name of egalitarian virtue, it is a question of creating junior chairs to recruit apprentice researchers without status - the equivalent of non-tenured researchers according to the CAPES - but also of encouraging HDRs[1] lightened beyond the control of the CNU, in order to recruit university professors locally chosen by their colleagues. The British model is favored here, at university as in secondary school. Cronyism will therefore cause increased havoc there, and there is no doubt that high schools will be able to recruit teachers who are in line with their public - the Islamists dream of it, who are not strangers to the hellish life led to young teachers assigned to high schools where they are in a position of strength.
Behind these reforms with egalitarian pretensions, the liberalism at work aims to tear down the republican institutional heritage of training. If the framework of the education system has held up to the present day, despite half a century of denaturation and a decline in the intellectual requirements required - the PISA ranking reveals every two years a collapse without equivalent in rich countries - it is because it still rests on the solid triptych of preparatory classes/agrégation/doctorate in the French style. The blows dealt in recent years have brought down the walls. The framework remains to be brought down. There is no doubt that the joint offensive of liberalism, which dreams of an American-style training system financed by families and banks - in place of the State - is well on its way. It finds an unexpected ally in ideology Woke - on the way to becoming the new “general” and managerial culture of young French elites trained in the fashion of business schools-, determined to liquidate the legacy of the disciplinary culture of the French Humanities - the legacy of "deceased European males" - the last major obstacle to the liberal and financial Revolution called for by our moderns.
Pierre Vermeren, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Paris1, President of the Scientific Council of LAIC, recently published France downgrading From deindustrialization to the health crisis, Text Tallandier, Paris, 2022.
