The Quality of France’s Educational System has gone down considerably since the 1970′s
France’s officials and many of its citizens often boast about the quality of their educational system. For one who’s a parents of primary level children here, in a priviledged area west of Paris and who was taught by this system about 30 years back, it’s quite distressing to see how low demands on children are on average today, in the 21th century.
Dozens of books have been published on this (links are below) , by concerned teachers, school principals, and researchers. Change is such a slow process here that despite the alarmingly low level of children coming out of the school system over the past tirty years, not much has been done to truly combat the bad habits a few doctrinaires enforced on the system in the 1970s.As was seen in the US at that time, they claimed that learning had to be fun, an activity of discovery. We have no problem with that, do we? However that does not mean that any sort of formal learning has to be eradicated from the teaching all together, does it? And that reading the classics also has to discarded as an activity from another era…
The consequences were that classes of 8 to 18 year olds starting studying what rappers lyrics were about or started choosing milk cartons as class reading material. Spelling has become a creative exercize in approximation for many youth who are taught to photograph words visually and learn them by heart rather than learn that ‘ b’ followed by ‘ a’ sounds like ‘ ba’. Teachers who refused to follow the Ministry’s official requests for this new approach to teaching were hindered in their carreers, even though their effects on children were clearly positive.
The most recent element on this topic is a study published by two university researchers, which indicates that Grade 7 students in France today have the same level of knowledge of spelling as Grade 5 students twenty years ago…
Links to elements – in French:
- A teacher-to-be’s blog, about the absurdity of the curriculum she is following and of the French educational system:
On Amazon.fr:
- JM Le Bris‘s Book titled: “Et Vos enfants ne sauront ni lire ni compter” (And your children will neither know how to read nor count)
- Danièle Manesse et Danièle Cogis : ‘”Orthographe, a qui la faute” (Spelling, Who’s Fault is it?)
- JP Brighelli : “La Fabrique à crétins” (The idiot factory: Failure of the School system)
