The education system in France, which used to be among the best in the world, undergoes a deep crisis, for reasons of wider interest than the local problems encountered by this specific nation.
The most-cited causes are lack of public funding and rigidity of the unions. Lack of public funding is a relative notion, especially when the entire proceeds of the national income tax are devoted to education (€77 billion in 2007, equivalent to 28% of government spending, almost 6% of GDP, compared to about 5.5%. in the U.S.). Private funding is missing much more, as the total expenditure for all levels of education reaches 7.5% of GDP in the US against 6.4% in France, a spread that could not possibly be reduced by a further increase in public spending.
Improper diagnosis and subsequent mistreatment only add to the intricacies of any serious illness. What motivates teachers’ unions to oppose almost any reform is a combination of constant decline in relative income together with a severe degradation of their working conditions. Masses of students are now unfit to classical forms of education for which they show little or no respect at all. It should be said in their defence that the system was not designed for their current needs, leaving them with high levels of unemployment.
The key to these issues is that a small-scale production system was turned into a mass-production with no structural change. This would be true in almost any country. Shameless demagogy only made things worse in France. Politicians, who had received an ultra-elitist education, promised the baccalaureate to everyone (a target of 80% of each generation was proudly announced in 1985).Putting aside the pure and simple impossibility to do this by other means than devaluating diplomas, professional training at primary school level was abandoned, secondary education being put on the same track in the name of equality, while overcrowded universities were discreetly postponing the necessary selection until it was too late.
Before WWII, a university such as Sorbonne had a faculty of hardly a few dozens people and a few thousands students. Secondary school teachers were recruited among the best students, paid like superior army officers, and treated as notables. Most jobs were obtained after primary school. Faculties are now measured in thousands, upper education in millions, teachers are underpaid, students spend years unwillingly sitting in classes where they remain unprepared to the real world. Those of them who do not dream of becoming drug-dealers or civil servants struggle to obtain internships from corporations terrified by what they see as hordes of unreliable barbarians.
Well-off families spend fortunes in private lessons to help their children keep up with the most exclusive private or public schools which, in any case, eliminate all students not on a par with their statistics, leaving others with the prospects of always more assistance from their parents or of a shaky future.
Few students are good or bad in maths by themselves. Some are lucky to have had a good math teacher, while others were not. The same applies to most fields of knowledge. No country can produce tens of thousands of good maths teachers. It is even more difficult to train at once new teachers for new branches of education better corresponding to the actual marketplace: accounting, law, electronics, general problem solving, design, etc.
The goal therefore is not to have more teachers leading more students to upper education, but teachers better paid, preparing all students to citizenship and employment.
One way to do this is to include professional training at every level, instead of turning it into mockery and a dead-end for the least gifted. One doesn’t need to be a follower of Mao to understand the advantage of having been trained in several skills during one’s youth. Some notions of say carpentry learnt at primary school and of software development learnt at secondary school would not make a worse lawyer after he got his PhD. Conversely, the basics of citizenship (introduction to the legal system, tax returns, world history, etc) should be considered a must for everyone.
The other way is to switch from the archaic system of one teacher in his class, to fully interactive digital learning. Richard Feynman, a leading physicist of the 20th century, was also a great pedagogue. He could have planted the seeds of science in to the mind of lemmings. Minds of such quality are scarce, and yet can be found in every generation. We can however leverage their talents by massive investments in the production of multimedia courses by people of this kind. Regular teachers should be retrained as coaches for the controlled and efficient use of digital lessons and related tests. A smaller number of more efficient teachers would select these courses as they used to do with manuals, customizing their usage for their various types of students. A large part of school time would be spent at multimedia libraries and workshops, requiring less physical supervision. Work could be seamlessly continued from home. Programs could easily evolve according to the economical or technological developments.
The goal is clear, the money is there. Will it happen soon enough?
You know how the world goes.
