Radical illiteracy
Frank Johnson
Paris According to a recent bestseller here, new state secondary schoolteacher, taking a class for the first time and inviting it to sit down, is apt to be met, from one or more of the pupils with some such reply as: Je vous emmerde.'
This is untranslatable directly, but is best rendered by the English `f— off' or 'sod you', although neither does justice to the coprophilious imagery of the original. Incidentally, French swearing tends to be inspired by anal imagery, English by carnal. There is scope here for a comparative monograph, or possibly a multi-volume work. In any case, je vous emmerde is very rude, especially from pupil to teacher. Techniques pioneered by such British bodies as ILEA seem at last to have reached the other side of the Channel.
Respect for authority, then, is said to be declining in French state schools. So too is respect for learning. Furthermore, the latter is a problem, not only with state pupils, but with state teachers. Such are among the several messages of the bestseller, Educa- tion in Distress, by Mme Jacqueline de Romilly, a don in Greek at the College de France. (L'Enseignement en detresse, - Juilliard, 50 francs): One cannot correct a dictation if the child does not know that there is a difference bet- ween the infinitive aimer and the participle aime. What can one do when one discovers that some students de licence [teacher-training college]often do not know of the existence of centuries before Jesus Christ? And how can one cope with students learning Latin who do not know that there were consuls at Rome because, quite simply, they no longer do, or never did, Roman history en seconde [at the age of-17 in the broad equivalent of the British sixth form]?
The conclusion that a British observer is likely to draw from this is simple: so they still teach Latin over there! And trainee teachers still study the centuries after Jesus Christ! But this was not the first reaction which Mme de Romilly intended to arouse. Her French audience is expected to be wor-
ried. The fact that they made the book a bestseller suggests they are indeed worried. That did not happen to our Black Papers. A country in which such a book could achieve such sales needn't be as worried as all that.
Whatever the comparison with Britain, French state education is widely believed by the French to be in distress. The broadly Gaitskellite or Wilsonian politicians who, with four Communists, comprise the pre- sent government, did not know about this. Or at least, they know it well enough now, but did not know it when, shortly after assuming power in 1981, they set out to subject private schools to greater state con- trol. All they knew was that they were sup- posed to be radicals, and radicals in France are supposed to feel passionately about the need to laicise education. Much of politics in the early Third Republic — when radicals for the first time embodied the establish- ment — consisted of the resultant uproar. One should never underestimate the influ- ence, on a left-of-centre party, of that party's ancestral windbags. With the Kin- nock Labour Party, it is Bevan. With the French Socialists, it is Jaures — but also, lurking down there somewhere, are to be found such figures as Gambetta and Ferry, the tremendous bellowers, lechers, boozers and parliamentary tacticians who con- ducted the triumphant campaign from the 1870s onwards on behalf of lay schools as opposed to Catholic schools. Their game 'I suppose Jenkins is trying to get the atheists back in church.' was to terrify much of the new electorate, particularly the artisans and small shopkeepers, into believing that the Catholic Church was a focus of disloyalty to the Republic. Even if this were true, which is debatable, it would have been extremely difficult for the Church to do anything about the Republic. But there can be no doubt that the issue was tremendous fun for the radical politicians. Most people were on their side. For the politicians, that made it, not just fun, but safe. All manner of exciting things were done, such as for- bidding Jesuit teachers to teach by the dramatic device of dissolving the Order.
The Mitterrand government's assault is rather less romantic, involving, as it does, placing the private, mainly Catholic schools under the vague control of education authorities. Doubtless they thought it could all be made to sound like a blow for equali- ty. If there were to be any demonstrations, they would be from grateful radical parents with some help from the teachers' unions. But in that Third Republic conflict between Catholic schools and the new lay schools, educational standards, as such, were not an issue. The two sides may have pressed the rival claims of' more philosophy or more science as opposed to theology. But neither side doubted that the subjects should be taught with due rigour. Hence the frighten- ing vision of French education which the British have gained from innumerable novels and from film such as Vigo's Zero de conduite, of the 1930s, and Truffaut's Quatre cent coups, of the 1950s.
But today's politicians had forgotten the je vous emmerde issues — discipline, decline in standards, and related British- sounding controversies. There were indeed demonstrations, but they were against radicalism. 'I have passed all my life in state, lay education,' says Mme de Romilly:
My father taught in it too. I was a pupil in it. I taught in it for nearly 40 years. I belong, in all the fibres of my being, and in my memories, to that tradition that I love and that I found admirable. But, seeing how education is changing, I understand now why parents cling to private education with the obstinacy of despair ... I understand how distrustful they are of the quality of the teaching and of the culture dispensed by the state.
Mme de Romilly's book is amusing to those of us who had assumed France to be safe from the hands of ILEA or the Open University. She has a chapter called `La Politisation': ... I know one such establishment in Paris where the first book to be read is the life of Mao.' In a chapter entitled 'The Rising Tide of Ignorance', she says a recent report on the level of knowledge of sixth formers found that 43.5 per cent of them placed Voltaire under Louis XIV, 43.1 per cent placed Mozart under the Second Empire, and 13.9 per cent placed Picasso there too. There is also a chapter on the decline of the teaching of French. What a relief it all is to a Briton. On the other hand, the book was a bestseller.
Previous page
