WHAT FRANÇOIS BAYROU COULD HAVE SAID ABOUT EDUCATION...

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WHAT FRANÇOIS BAYROU COULD HAVE SAID ABOUT EDUCATION

François Bayrou was a teacher. Rightly, he flatters himself about it. He was also Minister of National Education. For four years, which is no small feat. But it is true that this was more than thirty years ago. The French school was still "the best of the world," an expression which never meant anything, but which politicians use, or rather used easily. And now, forming his government, he has chosen to put at the forefront of the protocol order a ministry that finally brings together national education, higher education and research, in short, the ministry of the nation's grey matter. He even made It a State ministry and entrusted it to a former Prime Minister, a woman who is not very familiar with the field but energetic, competent and hardworking. After such an introduction, one could expect from his general policy statement of January 14, 2025, a speech that gives education the place it deserves in the public policies that allow the country to recover. Unfortunately, this was not the case. In front of a National Assembly more dissipated than any class in any "neighborhood" junior highschool, and demonstrating in this how authority cannot be decreed, he read a meagre page whose programmatic thinness does not bode well for what Elisabeth Borne (the minister) would be encouraged to do.

Apart from a few usual nonsense, he didn't say anything hard-hitting. However, he could have said important things about it. Among them, only a few examples.

Instead of being content to deplore the decline in the level of mathematics and reading, François Bayrou could have remembered what all the national and international evaluations show, year after year. What hinders the often mediocre results of "France" is not that our good students are less good, it is that more and more students are experiencing learning difficulties. It is therefore the weight of inequalities between students. Technically, this can be observed through the "variance" of the results obtained by the students in the national sample, which is always greater than in other non-comparable samples. With this in mind, all ministers should be convinced that only the fight against these inequalities will not only benefit the most disadvantaged pupils but will benefit the nation as a whole. This is the very meaning of the notion of "priority education" invented forty years ago and whose forms and financial resources devoted to it must be improved more than ever. With the doubling of certain classes in primary school, an interesting avenue has been attempted, but which, by its very rigidity, has lost some of its effectiveness. This is also well known: it is not the systematic duplication that is important, but the flexibility of the systems capable of adapting to all class configurations and pupils' needs. It is thus that in so many schools, more teachers are needed than classes, according to methods that are less mechanical than mere duplication. The cost may be considered high, but it is the price to pay to give meaning to the republican school. We always forget a fact that, however, all economists know: the cost of education has diminishing returns. In plain English, this means that, unlike car production, the more education reaches culturally poor backgrounds, the more expensive it will become. This is an insurmountable reality and one that in a way France has known for a long time. It is enough to remember the schoolmasters of the Third Republic, the famous "black hussars": they never presented their entire class for the school certificate at the end of primary school, but only those likely to obtain it.

We can choose to ignore these inequalities and assume their consequences by accepting an unequal school, which is what many political parties do. Or, on the contrary, to fight them, by giving the school the task of fighting them. The French school perhaps needs a "clash of knowledge" that but it needs above all a "shock of equality".

François Bayrou could also have made a more convincing speech on teachers than the eternal refrain of the "teacher to whom we owe everything" or the umpteenth lament of teacher training. Of course, he is right to deplore the current formation. But this should be an absolute priority as what is missing is a real apprenticeship, in the strict sense of the term, the one that links an apprentice and an apprenticeship master to the real profession of teacher, the one that is practiced today in the most difficult areas. The real job, not the job fantasized after meeting in his youth, nor that of a "quiet little job". Too often, it is feared that such an apprenticeship would be incompatible with the most complete mastery of one or more disciplines or with the passion that this profession requires. It makes little sense but, on the other hand, how can we finally make it clear that teaching is a profession that must be learned on the job with teachers who are partly (but only partially) seconded to training institutes. With all due respect to the young lecturers who work in these institutes, but today most often without ever having taught themselves in primary or secondary school, we know that this can be useful on a theoretical level but very little for professional practice. We must therefore plead for real solutions. Apprenticeship contracts that offer future teachers some chance to enter their profession with real knowledge of the facts. Once again, it will be said that this is expensive. But it is only demonstrated that this could cost even more, if we take into account all the consequences of an imperfect training of teachers.

François Bayrou, the Béarnais but also rather Girondin on the political level, could also have spoken of the decentralization of an education system which, once again, is bending under the weight of excessive centralism, making its organization more and more complex, to the point of sometimes sacrificing form to substance. This is the case for many subjects, in the management of trades, in the material organization of exams and competitions or in this monstrous aberration of Parcoursup, thought less for the benefit of students than in the perspective of the difficulties encountered by Parisian universities.

François Bayrou could also have spoken in his general policy statement on higher education other than to underline the deploring by his teachers of the low disciplinary level of students at the end of secondary school. This is an absurd way of opposing the two segments of the study pathway. However, he knows well or should know that the beautiful challenge of the university today is no more, (if it ever was), to remain an ivory tower sheltered from the vicissitudes and solicitations of the world. It is a player in the world by having to combine scientific excellence and territorial anchoring at different scales, local, national and international. When the degree of general competence rises, its mission is to bring the young or not so young generations to the appropriate level. This is the major challenge of the first university cycle to make this transition with the lycée to the graduate training courses that produce the country's executives. However, the inequalities mentioned above do not disappear with the end of secondary school. They remain all the more so since the vast majority of high school students now have access to higher education, in an irresistible movement that it would be absurd to want to fight. From this point of view, overall, the universities have played the game and tackled this issue head-on, even if it is with varying results. They have done so while progressing in research and development capacities, claiming more and more often this duality of great scientific ambition combined with a r-territorial anchoring that is totally unprecedented in history. For the simplest reason: there is no longer any development that is not based on higher education and research. As for the latter, one would look in vain for a reference to it in this statement.

Of course, a general policy statement cannot address all subjects. In the current context, the Bayrou government's priority is to survive long enough to pass a budget and accept the concessions that are essential to the various political parties to make it so. It cannot be a question of addressing all public policies in depth. But for all that, one could have expected a greater impetus, an educational singularity on the part of such a Prime Minister who had taken care to put forward himself in the structure of the government what could have finally been a priority.

And what has not been said has even less chance of being done.

Jean-Paul de GAUDEMAR

January 19, 2025

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