There are
two major school networks in France, and a large number of minor
ones. Public Schools (écoles publique), also called Secular Schools
(écoles laïques), are state run and free (as in free beer). In most
areas, they are the default schools and their quality is highly
dependent upon their localization. Some, in suburban ghettos for
instance, are dreadful, others, such as Henri IV in Paris or
Clémenceau in Nantes, are elite institutions, on par with the best
British public schools can offer.
Normally,
the school you go to is determined by the place you live in, but, of
course, there are ways to game the system, for instance by choosing
rare languages. It was common knowledge in my (pretty average) high
school, that those learning Russian (and later Latin) would be put in
a “good class”.For the record, I learned Russian, mostly because
most of my schoolmates chose English and I felt contrarian.
Private
Schools, also called Free Schools (as in free speech) are run by the
Catholic Church. They are particularly numerous in Western France and
in a few area they are the only available ones. They are emphatically
not free (as in free beer) but the fee is generally within the means
of the average French working class family. They were originally
created to provide their pupils with a Catholic education, and
religion is still a part of the curriculum, but for most people, they
are merely a higher quality alternative to the public system. If they
are numerous in Brittany, even in a working class city such as my
native Saint-Nazaire, it is, of course because the region used to be
a stronghold of the Catholic Faith, but also because Bretons tend to
invest more heavily in the education of their children and are more
willing to pay for it.
Ironically,
Catholic schools are more open to religious minorities than secular
schools. Most are under contract with the State, which pays the wages
of the teachers, and must welcome all children, whatever their
religion, which in practice means that a veiled Muslim girl’s is
better off in a catholic school than in a secular school where
showing one’s religion is likely to get you expelled.
Universities
are mostly public and secular – there are only seven Catholic
universities in the whole of France. There is however a clear
dichotomy between universities and the so called great schools.
In France, university is relatively cheap and open to anybody who has
graduated from high school. French universities are however
chronically overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed and a
significant percentage of the students drop out in the first couple
of years. This is a feature, not a bug. Despite what politicians
regularly say, the mission of the university is emphatically not to
train the elite of the nation. This is the job of the Great Schools,
a collection of specialized, mostly state run, institutions such as
Polytechnique,
Science-Po,
or HEC. Those
schools are not necessarily expensive but they are highly selective,
so selective, in fact, there are specialized preparatory classes, the
only purpose of which is to get you ready to try to enter
them. Those classes are themselves highly selective (I got admitted
in one of them, but due to some administrative SNAFU, I was the only
candidate from Saint-Nazaire. It helped) and the workload is hellish.
Similar
system evolved during the nineteenth century at around the same time
in all European state, from reactionary Prussia to supposedly
enlightened France and Britain, and of course the reasons for that
had nothing to do with humanitarianism. Thanks to an ever growing
supply of cheap energy, the advanced societies of the time created a
lot middle management jobs, something earlier cultures simply could
not afford. Those jobs could not be filled by illiterate peasants,
hence the necessity for the western European countries which wanted
to compete in the new international environment to invest heavily in
education.
The
school I studied at, for instance, was created after the
Franco-Prussian war because a leading industrialist, Émile
Boutmy, felt that Frenchmen kind of underperformed in political
sciences... and that It might have had a part in the recent and
somewhat embarrassing presence of Prussian soldiers in the Loire
Valley.
Things were more
complicated in France, however, because of the conflict between the
republicans , heirs to the 1789 revolution, and the monarchist who,
albeit they had accepted the inevitability of a constitutional
regime, sill nurtured the nostalgia of the Ancien
Régime.The Church openly favored the latter ones, which
caused the republican left to become more and more anticlerical.
After the overthrow of Napoleon the Third and the failure of the
royalists to reinstate monarchy, the Republicans became dominant and
fought a long ideological battle against the Church.
School was one of
the main battlefields. France had, since the Falloux laws in 1851, a
weird dual system, with some schools run by the states and some run
by the Church. All were under the supervision of both the mayor and
the commune's priest, and a large place was given to the
representatives of the three main religions in supervisory bodies. In
1881 and 1882, however, the republican (and imperialist) Jules Ferry
created a entirely state-run, free, mandatory and secular system. The
state and the (Catholic) Church were separated in 1905, which started
a protracted war between the "Devil's
School" and the "School
of Lies" for the young Frenchmen's
hearts and minds.
This war lasted
until 1983 when the newly elected socialist government tried to
create a “big unified secular public service of education",
which would have put private schools under the tutelage of the state.
The Church successfully mobilized and after a mass demonstration in
Paris, President Mitterrand decided to call the whole thing a day and
to fire the Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy.
After
that the "war of the schools" essentially disappeared from
French politics . Fringe atheist groups may rant about “anti-secular
laws” and Catholic fundamentalists run fringe schools where one
teaches that democracy is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord.
Most people, however, don’t care, and rightly so, for the real
victor of the war has been neither secular civic spirit nor
Christianity.
After World War
II, Western European nations underwent a period of rapid growth, in
a great part thanks to American oil and resources. This caused an
equally rapid complexification of their societies and the creation of
a lot of middle management jobs. As a consequence, the number of
university students exploded, something the until then rather rigid
institution was not ready for. Many of those new students were of
peasant or working class background and many adopted one or another
of the leftist ideologies which were in fashion at the time –
maoism was particularly popular in France, even though Trotskism was
a close second – while leading the same hedonistic and bohemian lifestyle as
all students since François Villon. This led to the may 1968
pseudo-revolution, when Parisian students took to the street and
occupied the Sorbonne because they were denied access to the girls’
dormitory (yes, no kidding, that’s how it began). They threatened
for a time General De Gaulle’s regime, then found out that
Frenchmen were not interested in a free love utopia when the
government recovered from its initial shock and rallied its
supporters.
The maoist groups
lingered until the eighties, a few student leaders acquired a lasting
fame, most notably Daniel
Cohn-Bendit, but the most lasting result of the 1968 events has
been the the invasion of the school system by the hedonistic,
utilitarian and materialist ideology of the upper middle class. This
invasion was progressive, of course, and teachers, as a group, are
still marked by the republican ideology – in the original,
philosophical, meaning of the term.
Their resistance
is more and more ineffective, however. From the mid-eighties onward,
ironically when the Socialist Party got into power, schools was seen
less and less as a tool to train citizens and more and more as a way
to choose elites and train workers according to the needs of the
economy.
This is a
particularly perverse evolution because, as Chistopher Lasch
demonstrated, social mobility is a poor substitute for democracy. It
does not question the supremacy of elites but actually promotes it.
The fact that a woman
of Muslim background became minister of justice in France will
bring little comfort to another woman of Muslim background working
part time for misery wages in a suburban supermarket. It can even
make her plight harder to bear. As a woman and a Muslim, she will be
told to consider Rachida Dati’s success as somehow her own (and
therefore please shut up when Rachida Dati’s decisions harm her).
Besides, the meritocratic mythology will brand her as a failure while
legitimizing the power of the elites and justifying the said elites’
contempt for the common people.
We are light-years
away from the democratic ideal, which postulates that all citizen are
of equal worth and can have an equal say in public affairs.
The irony is that
this happened just as France, and most other western European
countries, began to develop a chronic case of mass unemployment. The
global EROEI of our society had begun to decline, and unlike the
United States, we couldn’t compensate by extracting more resources
from our vassals. The supply of high-paying jobs suddenly dried up
and the competition for those left intensified. Connections and
ability to game the system (yours or your family’s) became crucial
and the rift between the professional class and the rest of of the
population became to widen again.
This trend is
bound to continue. As the amount of energy available to society
shrinks, the upper classes will fight to keep their privileges, which
means driving everybody beneath them into permanent poverty. Chances
are that they will use various kind of affirmative action to
legitimize this power and resource grabbing operation – in fact
they have already begun – and invest resources into elite
replacement through education rather than in something really useful.
As our resources
dwindles, so will our capacity to support not only parasitic elites,
such as Wall Street traders or bankers, but also useful ones such as
engineers or scientist. Our focus will have to change from building
to maintaining, and for that we need the kind of skill that
apprenticeship, not classroom, can teach.
We also need civic
culture – what Montesquieu called virtue – if we don’t want the
coming decline to be far more messy and bloody than it needs to be.
That can, and must, be taught in classrooms through the study of
history, literature, philosophy and sport – in short the classical
education of your average Imperial British boarding schools. The
purpose of such a curriculum would not be to teach marketable skills
but to train citizens and provide them with the frame of common
values and references they need to constitute themselves in a true
civic body – and effectively contest the supremacy of whatever
elite claims the right to rule at any particular time.
Of course, it
remains to be seen whether collapsing societies can afford this kind
of schools. They certainly won't be able to support such clumsy
behemoths as the French Éducation Nationale but both Song
China and Tokugawa Japan had extensive school networks and a high
level of litteracy. Medieval Europe, with its (generally literate),
village priests might have achieved the same result, if it had had
the will.
On the long run, I
fear it is this will, which will be lacking. Teachers, who have
mostly become bureaucrats, have no reason to decentralize the system
they live off, and elites little incentive to educate into
citizenship the people the claim intellectual supremacy over.
Schooling is therefore likely to remain focused on the training of
cranks for a global economic machine peak energy has already doomed,
and civic education likely to be more and more limited to the
indoctrination of "correct thinking".
This kind of
education system is bound to become more and more irrelevant as the
crisis deepens and people are forced to acquire survival skills and
it is easy to envision a point when it will be restricted to an elite
– a process, which is well advanced in some African countries. When
this elite will fall, and it will fall, what will be left of our
education system will go the way of Roman rhetoric schools. Only
those groups, which need their members to be formally educated –
the equivalents of the medieval Church or the Britto-Roman bardic
orders – will maintain educational structures.
In some areas,
that may mean nobody at all if local communities don't take the
matter in their own hands.
