Why the Public Schools?

Laurent Lafforgue:

Since my forced resignation from the High Council of Education, I have received hundreds of testimonials from teachers, parents, students and plain citizens of all social groups. Among these messages I have been particularly struck by those parents who have written me, in substance, “We have been so deceived, and we are so appalled, by what has become of the schools that we have decided to remove our children from there, and to teach them ourselves.” Or, “We have joined with other parents and are pooling our talents to form our own classes for our children”. Or, again, “Despite the financial sacrifice it represents, we have placed our children into private schools.” And finally, those most numerous messages which say: “Our children go to school, yes, but every evening we put them to work using old textbooks, and do what we can to give them the kind of rigorous instruction that is no longer given in their classes. But what a labor for them, and what a responsibility for us!”

That parents should go so far as to remove their children from school, to teach them themselves, at home, or to form parallel classes for them in which they, themselves, are the teachers, to prefer a school to which they must pay the fee to the free public school, or to impose on their children and themselves the burden of a night school added to the day school they consider to be nothing but a holding pen, all this became and remains for me a theme of profound dismay. And I notice as well that these are surely the parents who enjoy a high level of education and – for those who can pay the fees of a private school – of income. And then I think of the other children, who do not have the benefits of having been born into families similarly favored.

Students, all the students, are the primary victims of the destruction of the school. This destruction has resulted from educational policies of all the governments of the last few decades. It is not the teachers who are responsible for it, for they are victims themselves: firstly in that they have been prevented from teaching correctly, by the publication of national curricula which are increasingly disorganized, incoherent and emptied of content; then because the knowledge gaps accumulated by their students over the course of years have made the conditions of teaching ever more difficult, and have exposed them to incidents of increasing incivility and violence on the part of adolescents who have never been taught either the elementary understandings, the habits of work, or the self-control which are indispensable to the progress of their studies; and finally because the younger generation of teachers has suffered from an already degraded educational program, so that their own understanding is less certain than that of their elders, and, with the exception of some well tempered characters, has been disoriented by the absurd training so prodigally distributed by the teachers colleges.

Clusty Search: Laurent Lafforgue.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 9, 2008 7:00 AM
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