By Ralph
A. Raimi, 19 April 2006
France and the USA have been
following strikingly similar paths in recent years on the national education
front, though I would say France now has a better organized Opposition. Of course, France has a national Ministry of
Education, which issues the Standards they go by, whereas our NCTM is only
informally the creator of math standards; but if you compare what the French
ministry has been putting out in its successive decrees, their curriculum has
been dumbed down quite as visibly as ours, with national exams to match. It is this dumbing that Michel Delord and
his confrères
(that's French for "confreres") are trying to counter, with direct
appeals to the Ministry on more than one front.
I shall later say more about Delord
himself and about his confreres, but for now it is enough to know that he is a
middle-school math teacher in a remote village in the Bordeaux wine country,
and yet a member of the Council of the French Mathematical Society, having been
elected on a platform of activism against fuzzy math in the schools. This placing of Delord in the national scene
is remarkable in itself, since a middle school teacher ordinarily has no incentive
even to join that Society (I doubt if there is another such teacher in all
France), which is devoted to mathematical research and college-level teaching
if to teaching at all; and to become a member of its Council is more
extraordinary still, bespeaking both Delord’s energy and the interest of the
French world of mathematics in the quality of education in the schools, as well
as in the higher reaches of its own craft.
France has had interesting problems with reading as well as with math (and everything else!), phonics vs "global" methods, the defense employing language as opaque and as familiar there as here, educationese, falsifications in which “all students” and “balance” are prominent. In the higher grades, grammar is dying and the French language is being killed by the abandoning of the “dictée” as well. Ignorance of French naturally hinders the teaching of mathematics, too; so this gets compensated for by removing things from the math requirements. Hence the examinations and the “brevet” certifying completion of middle school are merely a joke, according to my informants.
The French Middle school, called “Collège”, parallels our Grades 6-9, a four-year span, and the high school (“Lycée”) has three years. The “Primaire” matches our Grades 1-5, but the French have three years of “Maternelle”, free but optional for the two “Pre-K” levels as we would call them, and compulsory at the 5-year-old level. Most parents take advantage of all three Maternelle years, though only the most elementary orientation to the world of talk, numbers and letters takes place before the third year (age 5); even so it sounds to me as if children in the first two years of Maternelle receive a more systematic “academic” orientation than their American counterparts in our own pre-schools. Though the Ministry of Education provides academic standards for all three of those years, I will refer only to their third year of Maternelle as “Kindergarten”, since it corresponds to ours in intent and age group (5 years). In fact, France has recently (1989) changed the names of all the grades, though casual conversation still uses the old ones, and the third Maternelle (our K) is now called the first year of the three-year “Cycle of fundamentals”, which therefore runs through what we would call the second grade.
Yet, unfortunately, the old designation, “Primaire”, omits Kindergarten, and this was of some importance until very recently, for while the standards (“Programme”) for the teaching of reading in the Primaire had one prescripion the Programme for Kindergarten was less definite, and written in such a way that students entering the first grade had often been infected with a “look-say” mentality by Kindergarten teachers proud of how many words their charges had “learned”. Result: many of them resisted the tedium of having to learn the alphabet, etc. when they got to Primaire. But this dispute is by the way.
The methods of enforcement of
academic standards differs between the our countries, too. We enforce by underground methods you know
so well, the NCTM (in the case of mathematics) taking advantage of the national
putative desire for more and better math education to sign up with NSF for
money to write awful texts, followed by relentless advertising, ultimately also
at public expense via NSF or Department of Education grants for “professional
development” and other attractive heading, including “research” and
“partnerships”, urged on increasing numbers of school systems by the publishers
and the colleges of education, all of whom have a financial interest in their
promulgation.
Our fifty States, in principle
independent of the national government, accordingly have varying Standards,
mostly bad or incoherent; and even what they might be deciphered to prescribe
is incompletely asked for in the statewide exams, which now are mainly written
– and scored -- to maximize the quota of “passing” students, a necessity now
that federal law (“NCLB”) stigmatizes states which don’t show enough
improvement from one year to the next. The
improvement is judged by the state itself; one can hardly imagine a less
reliable judge.
We here seem to have more phony
educational research too, than France does, for the debates there do not seem
to focus on experiment, or alleged experimental results of this or that
program. I have read only a few
newspaper articles or polemics on this subject, and in judging curricula they
never quote comparative statistics since all schools have the same
programs. Longitudinal comparisons are
possible, though subjective. To know
that as many students are “passing” today as ever before is not to know very
much. At any rate, none of my
information (except demographic and plainly factual) can be based on
educational research, and (warning!) my information almost all comes from my
side of what debate there is.
Not that the other side (even apart
from the Ministry itself, which has a very rich web site) is silent or unknown
to me. There is a web site called
"Café Pédagogique", the home of discussion
groups of teachers, and helpful hints and so on, but also news of the education
world. Here is the place to find articles by educationists attacking the
critics of current policy, generally with a combination of stuffiness and
sarcasm. The arguments here are on a high
intellectual plane, or try to be, and between them and the occasional newspaper
article from Le Figaro or Le Monde (Parisian, hence national,
papers), and other op-ed pieces whose URLs are sometimes sent me by my French
correspondents, I do get word from the various parties. I must say that the literary level of the
teachers, educators and journalists I read is very high, despite what is said
about the decline of language in the schools.
Now, back to America: A recent
announcement (January, 2006) of the Bush education budget proposal for the next
year at NSF suddenly sounded, in one item, as if it were proposing something
like what recently seemed to be happening in France on a rather detailed
level. That item concerns a financially
trivial part of the total education appropriation, but its wording is ominous:
“... $10 million for "a National Mathematics Panel to identify
key mathematics content and instructional principles;"
One comment I have read concerning
this legislation had it that NCTM was strongly in favor of this proposal, modest
though it would be in terms of dollars; furthermore, NCTM said it was prepared
to help in any way. How generous. The
way is now clear to producing a third edition of their Standards or PSSM, this
time at federal expense instead of from its own coffers, as were the 1989
Standards and the PSSM of 2000. The new
edition would have a mighty propaganda advantage in an official American Eagle imprimatur
instead of the indirect ones from math societies NCTM had smuggled into the
“front matter” of the first two editions.
On the other hand, this time NCTM might not have the field entirely to
itself in the appointment of the committees of writers. I will not now
speculate further on our problems, which in this connection would initially
depend on the way the members of this National Mathematics Panel should be
chosen. Let us return to France.
France has teachers’ associations, unions comparable to our NEA and AFT except that there are more than two big ones, but I don’t know that the associations of mathematics teachers have any force comparable to that of our NCTM, even though NCTM is ultimately only a voluntary force. In France the dictates of the national Ministry (They don't always say "national" there, but prefer, in some contexts, "de la République") are enforced in three important public ways:
First, directly and most visibly, they have a corps of "Inspectors" who scour the countryside, visiting classes and talking to principals and supervisors, giving grades to individual teachers and writing reports to the superiors of those teachers. This Inspectorate before 1989 was strictly national, but now is somewhat decentralized, there being 30 Districts (called “Academies”) covering the nation, each with its Rector in charge of its own budget, and each with its own Inspectorate, so that there can be some divergence in policy, despite standards (le Programme) that are uniform, and a national office for the Inspectorate as well. For example, the nationwide exam system, including the “Bac” for college-intending students graduating from the high schools, is operated by the national Inspectorate.
Local districts within the Academies have some autonomy as well, by certain decrees of 1982 and 1983 which I have never seen, but the division of responsibility that goes with local budgets is too much for me to follow. I do know that the actual curricular decisions are in no way local; they are national, and promulgated by the office of the Minister of Education in printed form, with fairly detailed commentary, somewhat like the “Frameworks” published by some of our states to aid in the understanding of the import of the state’s Standards. It is whether a teacher is following the Programme”, which is printed for everyone to see, that an Inspector judges. I'm not sure how often the inspection of any individual teacher takes place, but it is often enough to be a cause of concern, and if a teacher teaches something the Inspector considers to be in violation of the current Programme it generates a bad mark.
For example, teachers in the Primaire (Grades 1-5, following the Kindergartens) wanting to teach phonics a few years ago had to hide it from the Inspectorate. After much petitioning from distressed teachers and apparently everyone else except the experts in reading, a 2002 revision of Les Programmes , despite its further steps in dumbing down of the curriculum in basic mathematics and French, was accompanied by a clause stating that teachers (over the entire nation) were free to use what “methods” they thought proper, if not subject-matter. Academic freedom! Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. In the following three years there was considerable turmoil among teachers of early grades: Is phonics a forbidden subject or is it now permissible as a type of teaching? That depended on the District Inspectorate, it seemed, or sometimes even the particular Inspector who came around to the school; and some conflicts have ensued. Delord's group, SPRIM, has long espoused phonics, of course, and its associated email list has had many messages from teachers who have been, even since 2002, disciplined for exercising their apparent right to use phonics instruction as announced by the Republic.
“SPRIM” is the name of an email list Delord invited me to subscribe to; I read as much as I can there. It resembles the NYC Math Forum and the California K-16 list, except that it concerns only the Primaire, and contains news and controversy on all subjects, though mainly math and reading and writing. The acronym SPRIM is for “Sauver le Primaire” (i.e., “Rescue the Primaire” [from its present degradation]), this being the name of a petition Delord got up in 2002, signed by teachers and parents mainly, to submit to the authorities. The protest concerned the newly promulgated Programme for all the schools and all the grades, including another step in lowering standards for the Primaire. That 2002 Programme is still the law of the land.
In math such ambiguities as to
whether phonics is a subject or a method of teaching don't seem
to be in question: Such instructions as
that multiplication, by hand, of decimally represented numbers of more than
two-digits is forbidden admit no such evasive tactics. You will not do it, period. The Programme explicitly states how many
digits you can call for, at each grade. Delord says he was nearly fired in 2000
for daring to teach 6th graders how to multiply two four-digit
decimals. I have seen a comparison of
math standards for K-5, as stated in the Programmes from 1895 through 2002, and
the decline, while gradual, is enormous when seen over a century’s time. The Programmes can be tweaked every year, by
decree of the Ministry, but major changes have been at rather long
intervals. They are often the subject
of some public debate, one of which has been taking place almost continuously
and with increasing vehemence since 2002, as I shall describe when the time
comes.
Every revision of the French math
standards, from 1967 I believe, has "lightened" the list of things to
teach, or shoved them into later grades, so much so that when college-intending
high school seniors take the famous “Bac” (for “Baccalaureate”, the classy high
school diploma), they find themselves answering questions demonstrably similar
to what was asked of 10th grade students fifty years ago. What was done in the last two years of the
classical (19th Century, in fact) curriculum has now been shoved up
to the universities, who complain about having to teach college freshmen to
read and speak French, not to mention mathematics. (Business men say the same thing, in newspaper articles much like
those in this country.) Familiar story to us, of course, except that here it
has not been done by Congressional action, or official decree of the Department
of Education. Perhaps with the
“... $10 million for "a National
Mathematics Panel to identify key mathematics content and instructional
principles" we will find ourselves
following France in this regard as well, even though our federal intrusions
into the schools are in principle restrained.
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The French Inspectorate and the Programme
are
not the only means of enforcing the dumbing down of curriculum. The rather ragged system of preparing
teachers for the French schools that was in existence until very recently, a
combination of "normal schools" and divisions of universities, has
now been standardized by calling them all sites within a system called
IUFM, “University Institutes for the
Training of Teachers". As with the
Inspectorate, there is one IUFM for each of the 30 or so Academies, though this
doesn’t mean a single physical location, since a given IUFM may have links with
several local universities, and assign practice teaching (as part of the
program) anywhere within the district, too.
One cannot say the IUFMs “enforce” the national decrees concerning
curriculum in the way the Inspectorate does, but it is clearly an enforcing
mechanism in that it teaches future teachers according to the current
educationist dogma.
A teaching certificate from an IUFM
takes two years beyond a college degree (the college degree, called the License,
represents three years’ work, not four).
In this the French education establishment is behind ours in the race to
mediocrity, since their teachers are presumably college graduates with a
non-education major before getting to the IUFM for polishing up. I don’t
believe there is such a thing as an “education major” in the French
universities, though I might be wrong; still, since the IUFMs get to the future
teachers at the final stage of their preparation, their attitudes do get
across. Furthermore, the IUFMs are
increasingly “cooperating” with universities in seeing to it that proper
undergraduate programs are established.
It might be that education “majors” have been or will be established at
some universities with the assistance of the local IUFM.
All the IUFMs of today have a
constructivist philosophy, more recently established there than here in the USA
but just as firm. They have not yet
trained as much of the national teaching corps as we have under NCTM influence
in our own schools of education, but they appear to have as bright a
future. The main point I would make
here is that there really is no effective difference between the French nationalized
training of future teachers and our own teacher training via
"independent" colleges of education, even though in principle
our schools of education stand on their own feet, independent of federal or
even NCTM philosophy if they like. Our
schools of education represent a uniform system just as much as do the thirty
IUFMs in France, and we partly (at least) govern them by the strings on our
grant money from Washington, whereas France does it by decree from Paris.
The third influence on French educational
policy, curriculum and teaching, at least in mathematics, is the system of 26
IREMs (Institutes of Research in Math Teaching) that was established in 1967,
even before the IUFM (Teachers’ Colleges) were established. Again, the IREMs are not strictly speaking a
mechanism for enforcing current Ministry educational requirements, but their
influence resembles that of our larger schools of education, as places where
education experts do formal education research. I don’t know if these 26 IREM’s are divided using the same
regional boundaries as the IUFMs and the Inspectorates, but they do cooperate
with teacher training in a big way, and they got into the game earlier than did
the IUFMs. They publish a journal, they
organize Conferences, regional and national
summer schools, and so on. I have not
found out why anyone pays attention to their activities, i.e., whether
teachers who attend their conferences and summer schools get higher pay or
something, but I do know that many of their activities are in general
considered another bad influence by Delord and his party. This is not universally the case, e.g., the Director
of the IREM of Lorraine is a mathematician (J. P. Ferrier, at the University of
Nancy) and an associate of Delord’s in the GRIP, which is described below. So the education researchers in France might
not be all bad. Sorry to say, I have
never seen a French education research journal.
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When I first began to correspond with
Delord, in December of 2001, he told me he had felt himself, until a year or
two before, quite alone in France in his concerns about math teaching in the
schools. There already were
organizations with email lists and web pages opposed to official doctrine in
reading and writing, and to the dilution of curriculum in general, but none as
yet devoted to math in particular.
Reading some American web pages, Delord came into contact with Wu, Askey
and a few others, and little by little saw a way to approach the French
authorities (who had recently nearly ended his teaching career) with his
petitions, via his own web page and by building an organization similar to
Mathematicallycorrect.
Delord reads English well, and can
write in English, too, though at some cost in time, much like my trying to
write in French. Still, I write to him
in what I conceive to be French, as often as I have courage and energy, and he
tries out his English when he feels adventurous. He was invited to the NYC Math
Forum list but had to give it up after a year for lack of time.
When the 2002 Programme was
published, then, Delord got up his petition, the “appel” Sauver le Primaire,
protesting that Programme to the Ministry of Education. He got it signed by a
lot of people, mostly teachers but also a few university professors and even
some foreigners. That’s how I got into
all this, when Delord translated his petition into English and asked (on the
list K-16 or NYCHOLD) for someone to read his English version to see if it was
acceptably done. I volunteered, and
found it excellent if not quite idiomatic; I signed it and so did a few others
from this country, Canada and perhaps England.
Not that anyone in the Ministry paid any attention to the petition; but
by this means Delord recruited a good number of members of what was to become a
standing organization, also with the name SPRIM.
By 2003 Delord and the mathematician
Jean Pierre Demailly, with a rather more select crew of associates (fewer than
forty), formed an opposition group called
GRIP (Interdisciplinary Group for the Study of the School Standards). Its interest is the entire curriculum,
not just math or the Primaire. GRIP has
a public web site, http://grip.ujf-grenoble.fr., and last
year (5 July 2005) it was officially recognized as a non-profit Association
under the Law of 1901.
(Everything you do in France is by
virtue of some law or other, always named by giving its date, sometimes down to
the day. Example: "DEFENSE D'AFFICHER",
as anyone who has visited France will surely recall, invariably comes with
"Loi de 29 Juillet 1881" in explanation, affixed to the same wall,
just below the command that denies the legality of its presence there.)
Among the members of GRIP are mathematicians,
J. P. Demailly, its President, among them; and school teachers and former
teachers at all levels, Michel Delord (Vice President) and Marc Le Bris
prominent among these. There are also
teachers and university professors of physics, philosophy, chemistry,
astronomy, etc., and even a former Inspector.
Le Bris is the author of a 2004 book of his experiences in the public
schools: And Your Children Will
Neither Read Nor Calculate. Though GRIP concerns itself with K-12 education
generally, it seems to have a particular interest in science and math. Delord has signed up some foreigners as
“Corresponding members”; these all are mathematicians: Tony Gardiner in
England, Klaus Hoechsmann in Canada, Garth Gaudry in Australia, Ron Aharoni in
Israel and me in the USA. (I don’t see
Wilfried Schmid on the list of members, though he has had some dealings with
it.) GRIP has an email list, too, from
which I learn a lot.
The first formal, public action of
GRIP was to issue a manifesto, Fundamental Knowledge Needed for the Future
of Science and Technology, with Laurent Lafforgue as one of the main
authors. Lafforgue is a Fields
Medalist, and while not a member of GRIP though friendly with its leadership
and ideals, he does serve as an eminence grise, occasionally
writing something that gets communicated to us from above, as it were. He writes very well, and the Fundamental
Knowledge document was mainly written by him and Demailly, though it bears a
few other signatures of note, including those of J.P. Serre and Alain Connes,
both Fields Medalists. Who exactly is
or was the original audience for this document is not clear to me. I believe it had been written, or written in
another form, before being discussed as a founding document for the GRIP, which
it now is. It has an Appendix
containing reproductions of a bit of Delord’s school work in his childhood,
which may then be compared with a “modern” 4th grade math text in
which one is taught to divide 650 by 24 by subtracting 24 from 650 a sufficient
number of times, one by one, a method popular here, too. Another page of a currently favored French
textbook states, with a picture, that the perpendicular bisectors of the sides
of a triangle meet in a single point, the center of the circumscribed
circle. No hint of proof is given, nor
any indication that such a thing would be desirable. You can find this document and much else at Delord's own web
site: http://michel.delord.free.fr/index.html. Some of the Delord site contains things in
English, which is not the case for the GRIP site.
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One more important acronym is SLECC,
for Savoir Lire, Ecrire, Compter et Calculer. (In plain English: “Let’s hear it for the three R’s!”) This acronym names the current major project
of the GRIP, and indeed is the reason for GRIP’s having taken the legal step of
becoming an “Association loi de 1901”.
SLECC itself is a group of people, teachers in the primary schools, who
are participating in this project, and who communicate with each other and the
world mainly via the list SPRIM (“Sauver le Primaire”, remember?), and it is
from reading this list that I have come to understand something of the French
educational politics as seen from below. Primaire is all that SLECC
deals with, whereas GRIP is all K-12, and in particular is interested in the
college-bound, which of course is an ever increasing part of the public. But all these groups have the common goal of
preserving literacy, whichever fragment of that public concerns them. It is apparent that GRIP hopes to extend its
current project (SLECC) from the Primaire to the higher grades, and in the near
future.
For now, led by Delord and Marc Le
Bris, SLECC has coalesced from a bunch of teachers dissatisfied with the
dictates of the National Inspectorate, and of the Programme of 2002 limiting
the math and reading they can teach, and has incorporated itself into an
official “Experimental” group legally in a position to apply for national grant
money under the aegis of the GRIP and the Law of 1901. Le Bris is the leader of the effort, though
Delord seems up to now to have put in most of the organizational leg work.
Many SLECC members a year or so ago
were already busily subverting the official decrees where they could, by
teaching forbidden things like phonics and arithmetic, not just as a matter of
conscience or for the love of defiance but in preparation for an official
standing GRIP had applied for in June (2005) and had reason to believe would be
given. For SLECC had the support of
very important people in high reaches in and out of the government of Jacques
Chirac, one of them (not in the government) being Laurent Lafforgue, whose
titles (Fields Medalist and Member of the Institute, to begin with) carry more
dignity and authority in France than membership in the Institute for Advanced
Study and a Fields Medal would carry here.
In Congress, I mean, and The White House.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Last spring, then, under the
leadership of Jean Pierre Demailly, mathematician and President of GRIP, SLECC
began to set up a model curriculum of its own, resembling the 1945 French
Programme in math, reading and writing, and whatever in geography and
literature (etc.) one can place in those grades. The program for the first two grades is largely written, since
this was the most urgent need if SLECC was to get started in the classroom last
fall. To say that 1945 dates the basic
Programme is really to say that SLECC is reverting to a Programme that was
fairly stable from 1882 to 1945, 1882 being the year, when Jules Ferry
initiated the modern French system of universal secular primary education. (I
have heard it said that the Inspectorate was established then for more than
observation of teaching effectiveness, but to make sure the Church didn’t
smuggle some of its doctrine into the schools of the Republic.)
Written out in some detail, and
accompanied with a full list of the teachers who, scattered around France,
intended to teach it, and with other legal details including a request for some
modest financial support, the proposal was submitted to DESCO (Department of
school instruction, of the education ministry, at 110 rue de Grenelles in
Paris) for formal approval for the year 2005-2006 as an “experimental” project
(loi de 2002). “Rue de Grenelles” is
often shorthand for the ministry of education, much as “10 Downing Street” is
sometimes a name for the British prime ministry. It is quite a nice street.
Justice is not fast, goes a common
French saying, and while Demailly and Delord got friendly noises from Rue de
Grenelle, the fall term of 2005 had to do without a formal mandate. Most of its
members, those who could get away with it, began teaching it anyway (Grades 1-2
to begin with), after having attended an SLECC "summer school" the
previous summer. (A truly cooperative
effort: Nobody got paid to attend or teach in that summer school, imagine!) In the fall, when some teachers of forbidden
lore were having trouble with the Inspectorate, or the local administrations
(DESCO), a kindly official directly under the Minister of Education wrote a
formal letter to SLECC saying that to do this (teach arithmetic and reading by
1945 standards) was all right, and had the blessing of the Rue de Grenelles for
any teacher who secured the permission of the local office of DESCO (the
administrative branch of Education Nationale, remember?). Some did get that permission, some didn't,
but those who had trouble generally won when they produced copies of the
comforting letter, even though they were not (yet) decrees of the Ministry.
Delord organized all this, reproducing copies of the letters wholesale, along with
copies of the syllabi and so on, an enormous task, since he was also compiling
lists of members and their addresses.
And recruiting. And posting his
philosophical discourses on his web page.
And answering questions from disturbed teachers, sometimes comforting
them, on the SPRIM list. And waiting
for the Ministerial decree declaring SLECC a formal "Research
experiment" permitted under the Law of 1901.
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As mentioned above, one of the
points of national contention, going back to before 2002, had to do with
phonics, which had been forbidden as a method of teaching reading before the
decree of that year, which had improved things slightly by saying rather
vaguely that teachers could pursue what methods they liked (the “academic
freedom” clause), in whatever they taught. Last fall, in answer to a question
in the National Assembly (during a scheduled "question time" as in
London), the present Minister, Gilles de Robien (b.1941, lawyer and politician
and refreshingly not up from the educational trenches at all), was asked if he
really wanted teachers to use phonics rather than "global" (i.e.
whole language) instruction, and replied "Sure thing" or words to
that effect, and that his office was composing a corresponding decree. And so it did (3 January 2006). The embarrassed “global” reading advocates,
as soon as he made that startling statement in the Assembly, came back with
three sorts of defenses of their own position:
1.
There was no problem; global methods hasn’t been used in ages, just
ages. Shocking that anyone should have thought otherwise. Nor has “global” been required by the Inspectorate, since it should be
well-known that since the publication of the 2002 Programme we have been using
a “balanced” approach, and not ignoring the “decoding” method at all. Hardly
anyone fails to use the sounds of the alphabet, and the majority of textbooks
now in use pay close attention to these syllabic features of the reading
process. Besides, the illiteracy rate
in France is no different from that in other European countries. So what was all the hullabaloo about?;
2.
A Ministerial decree specifying a particular method of teaching reading
is inconsistent with the 2002 decree saying teachers could use what methods
they saw appropriate. Robien should
shut up.
3.
We all have the welfare of the children at heart. “Methods” of teaching in Grades 1 and 2 are
not all that important, since the Kindergarten and pre-school grades, not to mention
Grades 3-5, where real literature reinforced reading ability, count for a great
deal. What is important is to take to
heart all the research of the past thirty years, and bring our children up to
be good citizens of the Republic.
(I have taken Points (1) and (3)
above from a manifesto issued by a consortium of teachers’ unions, instructors
in the teachers’ colleges (IUFMs) former Education department officers, etc,
and signed by persons whose names have frequently been mentioned in the GRIP
and SPRIM emails as having written articles and books of constructivist
bent. Point (2) appeared in a newspaper
column and could carry weight if “phonics” is construed as a “method” of
teaching and not a “subject” of knowledge. My paraphrase of the columnist’s
disdain for Giles de Robien, conservative Minister of Education, is accurate.)
Arguments of this sort filled the
op-ed pages and were reproduced in Café Pédagogique
for a few days and then died down. In
truth, none of this matters to SLECC, which can use its own syllabus, and which
hopes that a few years will show a sufficient difference between the
experimental classes' test scores and those of the rest of the country to be
convincing. It would have been nice if
SLECC could have had a grant of money to help it on its way, a grant for which
GRIP asked as part of its formal proposal to the Ministry; but from the summer
of 2005 through the following winter SLECC worked out of Delord's dining room
or maybe front yard in summer, and the administrative costs of mail correspondence,
photocopy and travel were borne by him as well.
Over the course of this period there
were other interesting developments in the relationship of the mathematics
community, and of mathematics teaching in the early grades, too, with the
national government and its education establishment. It should be mentioned that there is, as there always is in
France, a political backdrop to all this.
The year 2002 saw the last major revision of the Programme, in the
direction of easing up on requirements, and while that Programme is still in
effect it was what the opponents of “soft” education hoped was the swan song of
the Jospin administration. In April all
the politics changed: Chirac, a
conservative by French standards, was elected President of France, replacing
Jospin, and the following parliamentary elections also favored his conservative
party.
The new administration, with Luc
Ferry the new (2002) Minister of education, took immediate steps to
decentralize the educational establishment, a reorganization that involved the
loss of thousands of jobs. Naturally,
there were protests in the streets and strikes of this and that union, but the
government held firm. There were no
immediate changes in curriculum, however.
For this, the Ministry had a new idea:
In the spring of 2003 it unleashed what it believed to be a way of
enlisting the whole country in establishing a new era in national
education: A National Debate.
A Commission on the National
Debate on the Future of the Schools was appointed in September of 2003; it
was an enormous Commission, 33 members, plus five “parliamentary associates”
and five lawyers (I don’t know why).
The genuine members ranged in degree from former ministers to a
professor of cuisine; no part of the population went unrepresented. Claude Thélot, a distinguished engineer with many previous services in
government and the universities, was chairman.
The Minister (Luc Ferry) himself was no politician, but a professor of
philosophy with many books to his credit.
He was noted for his rejection of the deconstructionist babble of the
academy of the era generally called “1968”, of Lacan and all that. Things began to look better for education.
The Thélot Commission composed 22 good questions for the public to
think about, both posted on the internet and printed in many thousands of
pamphlets for nationwide distribution, including excellent summaries of the
fine points at issue in each question.
The Commission spent six weeks publicizing them all, with talk show
appearances and editorials in the papers.
For the next two months 13,000 public meetings were held, in every
corner of the country, in schools and town halls, meetings administered by
local school or other government officials but each one carefully arranged to
have an independent leader of discussion, “independent” meaning not a member of
the System. It would be a prominent
local citizen, a lawyer, judge, business man…
Even the schools were dismissed for a couple of days for these meetings.
Each meeting discussed whichever of the 22 questions it wished to, or had time
for, and the leader then wrote a report synthesizing the views of his meeting
and sent it to Paris, where a further great collating and synthesizing was to
take place. A typical meeting would
report on five to ten of the questions, the ones that locality considered the
most urgent for them.
In addition, the Commission web site
accepted written opinions from everyone who chose to use his computer to write
one. To do this was easy, and there
were 12,000 of these received by the time the Great Debate was over. The site published (posted) many of the
typical submissions received, and the process was as transparent and democratic
as possible. The Great Debate ran for two months, November 2003 to January 2004. The following two months were spent
“synthesizing” the results, so that in March the Commission could begin its
final study of the nation’s needs and desires, to issue its Report on 15
September 2004. If the National
Education Ministry were to publish any serious amendment to the Decree of 2002,
it would certainly have had plenty of input.
Finally, the Thélot commission took personal testimony from
representatives of concerned organizations, such as unions of teachers, of
industries, scholarship and so on, much as an American Congressional committee
hears from lobbyists and experts when considering new legislation. And Demailly and Delord, representing GRIP
and SLECC, made a presentation of their own, urging an old-fashioned program of
the SLECC sort, with some detail.
The 22 questions covered the ground
quite well. How should we motivate our
students? How should we accomodate
students whose home language is not French?
How should we maintain good order in the schools? Role of parents? What minimal (“common”) curriculum? What special attention to the failing students?
It was a grand debate all right, but
you could have written the report yourselves, any of you who are reading this
far. The Thélot report (found in both French and
English at http://www.debatnational.education.fr/index.php?rid=76) was boiler-plate, in favor of good order,
motivation, a demanding curriculum that everyone can pass, and with parental
input welcomed. The report did contain
some hard demographic information, however, in that it published the number of
reports it had received for each of the 22 questions, thus indicating which
questions were most on the mind of the public. Curriculum came in a poor sixth,
after such problems as motivation of students, maintenance of good order, and
“diversity”.
Not much in the way of a new Programme emerged, at least immediately, following the end of the Great Debate. Though the report did ask for a common minimum curriculum, it was vague, asking, for example, for “mastery of the French language” by the end of – I’ve forgotten just which grade, not that it matters, since “mastery” itself is a matter for debate. As it was clear that a national minimum curriculum had to be established, the government decided to form a new advisory committee to do this. And more.
Early in 2005, the National Assembly
created, replacing what under the preceding law was a pair of such high-ranking
councils for setting priorities for the Ministry of Education, a new High
Council of Education (HCE), to study the virtues and failings of the
current educational system and make recommendations, indeed, commands, to the
Education Nationale, which would be obligated under the law to be bound by HCE
dicta in its advisories, which are issued at an average rate of between one of
two a month, even when the full-scale “loi” (France is still under that loi de
2002, as occasionally amended) hasn’t changed . The nine members of the HCE were appointed in a legislated
fashion: three by the President of the
Republic, two by the Senate, two by the Deputies, one by this and one by that.
The appointed members were announced in the spring of 2005 and were all well-known
figures in French intellectual and artistic life (its President, for example,
is Bruno Racine, Director of the Pompidou Center in Paris), and one of them,
one of the three appointed by the President of the Republic himself, was
Laurent Lafforgue.
At last, one of our own in a very
high place! This HCE was instructed, as
its first task, to create a new national "basic learnings" list for
K-12. Called a "socle" in French, it intends to be something much
shorter and pointed than a Programme, but so definite that future edicts and
advisories cannot avoid it. (The
literal meaning of “socle” is “base”, usually referring to the stone base on
which a statue or other monument is erected.) Well, Lafforgue was only one of
nine, and while most members came from the universities or business, science
and the arts more directly, at least one of them is a high official in the
national Inspectorate (and earlier was the Inspector General of one of the Academies), and another HCE member also
had close ties with the system, so that there was bound to be trouble, given
Lafforgue’s well-known disdain for the entire establishment.
In preparation for its first meeting
(last November), Racine put out an agenda explaining that the HCE was going to
begin its studies by appointing a commission of Experts in Education to guide
the Commission of which he was President.
These Experts were of course to be drawn from the knowledgeable
officials of the current Education Nationale (e.g. the chiefs of the national
Inspectorate, the IREM [educational research institutes], the IUFM [teachers
colleges] and so on, plus some correspondingly high foreign education experts.
Though Racine’s Agenda didn’t say
so, the Experts were clearly going to instruct the HCE concerning an
appropriate “socle”.
At this Lafforgue blew up, and wrote
a blistering letter to Racine explaining that it was exactly the failure of
these so-called experts that had led to the creation of a
NON-"Expert" HCE to fix the problem, and that calling on the usual
experts would be akin to asking the Khmer Rouge for advice on human rights in
France.
(An English translation of this
letter can be found on Delord’s web page, at http://michel.delord.free.fr/mailll.pdf.)
Lafforgue said other pungent things in this private letter (private within the HCE, that is; he sent copies to the other seven members), though the pungent part was followed with a lengthy constructive part that the newspapers (once it was leaked) tended to ignore. In his letter Lafforgue particularly called attention to Marc Le Bris’s 2004 book with its own inflammatory title, Your Children Will Know Neither How to Read Nor Calculate, and to the web site of Michel Delord, for further information on the current state of French education and what needs to be done about it. He called current directives for both reading and math instruction “insane”, and proposed, in outline and by reference to some books he named, replacements.
Cultural sidelight: In his letter, Lafforgue wrote, “…I recommend the internet site of Michel Delord, a simple middle-school math teacher but one who has an impressive knowledge of the history of our educational system.” High praise; I would myself had felt honored if he had mentioned my web page, whatever label he placed on my position or career. But in America nobody, not even a genius, would have dared to say “a simple middle-school math teacher”; it would be teacher-bashing and would put an American Lafforgue in the elitist dog-house forever. Not so in France. Lafforgue is French, where a Fields medallist and Academician is entitled to imagine himself less “simple” than a school teacher. Furthermore, in this particular letter, from beginning to end, Lafforgue insisted on placing accuracy ahead of diplomacy: When he wrote of the willful “destruction” of the French educational system he was giving Racine the straight facts. If in interpreting this letter Racine had a right to know Lafforgue was an Academician and Fields medallist, he also had a right to know who Delord was. Delord’s web page – had Racine consulted it instead of firing Lafforgue – would have told him the rest.
Within the hour the letter was leaked -- all over the Ministry of Education, IUFMs, Inspectorate and the newspapers -- and after a few conferences in Paris Lafforgue resigned from the HCE. (Lafforgue’s web page contains a statement of the exact circumstances of his being persuaded to resign, and other things relative to his letter as well, but all in French: http://www.ihes.fr/~lafforgue. (Delord’s web page has an English translation of Lafforgue’s public explanation of why he resigned.)
The President of France, Jacques
Chirac, accepted the letter of resignation graciously after thinking it over
for a few weeks. (Naturally there had
been a petition to him, led by GRIP and SPRIM, asking him not to accept the
resignation, but, as expected, it suffered the fate of most
"Appel"s.) Chirac’s letter
also said that
he appreciated Lafforgue's efforts in behalf of school education, and his
lively criticisms, and hoped and expected the HCE to have the benefit of his
views in the future even though had had chosen to leave his position
there. We hope so too.
This "Affaire Lafforgue" occupied the Delord forces last fall, all the while the SLECC "Experiment" was getting underway, but much has calmed down by now. The HCE, however, with a new ninth member to replace Lafforgue, was still in process of producing a socle, for which they had a deadline in March, 2006; and it presumably was taking the advice of its panel of Experts. (The French for "Expert" is "Expert".) GRIP with good reason expected a constructivist-dominated socle and is therefore producing a counter-socle of its own; but the public debate on that one has not really begun, and of course could not begin before the HCE version became edict. One wag, when a draft version began circulating last winter, wrote of it, “It is not a base (“socle”); it’s a stump.”
After a draft version had been known to the GRIP for some weeks, the final version of the socle was published on 23 March 2006. In my own view its prescriptions for the learning of French are pretty good, and include explicit requirement of the teaching of grammar (though “in context”, a possible way out for those who oppose systematic grammar lessons); but there can be no getting around the socle’s explicit demand for the “dictée”, proper spelling, and the memorization of classical texts, as once was traditional in French schooling. In mathematics, however, the HCE managed to finesse some of the important issues, while making grand sounds concerning mathematical reasoning and arithmetic competence. Calculators don’t rate a mention, for example, neither one way nor another, though manipulatives and situated lessons for the early grades are asked for. Along with explicit mention of the importance of applications, probability in particular, the math part insists on the importance of “proof” in mathematics at all levels, of “proportionality, i.e. “the rule of 3”, and of graphs. So much for the socle, which of course has to be fleshed out by decrees from the Education Nationale. That debate comes next.
Now, SLECC during January and February had an official permission to exist
and, albeit not yet sanctioned by an official decree of the Minister of
Education, and still a bit uncertain in some locations, it at least had
permission to conduct its experiment if local DESCO officials didn’t forbid
it. Many of its participants did begin
the program, some covertly beginning with the fall term of 2005 and until March
10, 2006, when a Ministerial announcement silenced the demurring
Inspectors. Now it is written: the
Cabinet of the Minister has formally approved the petition of SLECC,
recognizing its members, whose names had been filed in Paris, and approving its
curriculum for Grades 1 and 2 also as filed in the petition for recognition as
an Experimental Program.
That curriculum, more detailed than
any “socle”, by the way, is based on the national Programme for 1945 as I
understand it; but wherever the words came from they describe what any sensible
person would ask for those grades. The petition also included a brief statement
of curriculum expectations for Grades 3,4, and 5, and the decree which
recognizes SLECC’s Grade 1 and 2 format also looks forward to including the
next three grades if conditions at some future date warrant that. The whole Primaire! These curriculum
expectations include using really old-fashioned texts and methods, including
the all-but-defunct “dictée” for
learning French and the paper-and-pencil procedures for the full-scale
arithmetic of rational numbers in fraction and decimal notations. Applications of arithmetic will occur
throughout.
I should mention something about the
“dictée”; it is
more than the corresponding exercise in English, though its definition is the
same: The teacher reads aloud and the
students write it down. In English of
course this is a valuable thing to do, but it doesn’t really teach much about grammar,
which in English is mainly conveyed by word order and some easily heard
regularities in verb forms. An English “dictée” doesn’t teach as much, and can’t diagnose as much, as a
French one.
In French there are spellings that
don’t get heard at all, a final unpronounced “e”, or “s” for example, which can
only be got right by the listener if he knows the grammatical structure of what
he is hearing. Explaining the reasons
for these silent changes in spelling is a large part of the teaching of French
grammar; students who get these things wrong simply don’t understand what they
are hearing. Thus there are
possibilities for the destruction of the ability to read in France that we
don’t enjoy in this country, and the French educational establishment with its
notions of “natural” learning has been taking full advantage of them, the
discouragement of the dictée and of
memorization of classic texts being the main ones.
In addition to the permission to
experiment thus, using the teachers signed on to SLECC and the Grades 1 and 2
programs indicated, and others as will be added by next fall, the Ministry is
granting SLECC 15,000 Euros (about $18,000) for expenses for the present year,
and is recognizing Le Bris and Delord as President and Vice President of the
organization. Local authorities are
instructed to grant Le Bris a 100% relief from his teaching duties in
2006-2007, and Delord a 50% reduction.
At least, this is how I interpret the unfamiliar technical word “décharge” used in the communication I have
read, which is a letter from Demailly to the GRIP list, which did not quote the
whole official notice from the Ministry.
All the Rectors of the Academies (the school districts) have been
informed of official action of the Cabinet of the Minister of Education
approving the SLECC experiment.
Obviously the Minister himself approves the project, and it is clear to me that this is not just the equivalent of a minor NSF-EHR grant, despite the modest appropriation so far in Euros and partial salaries, but a certain sign that at least part of the French government, if not the HCE, is acquainted with the failings of its current education experts and hopes to gather evidence, via SLECC, supporting a reform of the entire national Programme.
I have no idea what, if any, “research” will accompany the SLECC program. The Proposal was a mere letter (though of some length) detailing the purpose of the project, the curricular material SLECC will be using, the names of the participants, the manner of record-keeping, etc. It cannot help but track the progress of its students in national exams, of course, but whether its (unannounced) control group is the whole rest of the nation or is scientifically matched to its participants I don’t really know. One thing we can all find out from this project, even without controls, is whether arithmetic algorithms, phonics and dictées curdle children’s brains, softening them and denying their addicts the higher order thinking skills enjoyed by those who have managed to avoid them.
As the SLECC participants are coming into the home stretch of the first year, which last September got off to a ragged and barely legal start, they are preparing for the next year, beginning with a big conference in the town of Gien in the chateau country of the Loire, to take place the weekend of April 21-23, 2006. There will be about forty participants, mathematicians and master teachers giving papers, and teachers from the ground level taking notes. And the leaders of GRIP and SLECC will plot the future of French education in general, and mathematics and language education in particular. Much of the high brass from the Education Nationale has also been invited, though it appears only one or two will attend. The meeting will not only be a grand social get-together of SLECC, or folks who communicate by email almost daily, but it will be laying explicit plans for Grades 3 and 4, which will join the experiment in little over a year.
France is a small country compared to the USA, and a thing like SLECC is much more visible there than it would be here. And the idea that a single teacher in each of twenty-five or thirty schools scattered over the country could be part of a unified program, impervious to the opinions and influences of the Principals of the schools affected, sounds impossible here, though perhaps in Grades K-4, where a single teacher governs her class for all academic work it might be managed. At any rate, it sounds like a good experiment and one worth watching from here. Now, the eve of the Gien conference, at which many plans for the future of SLECC will be bruited, is a good time to halt this account. I’ll be back with more news as it breaks.
Ralph A. Raimi
19 April 2006