[Une prof en France] The reform of the reform: gas plant in perspective

I have to tell you! This week, an afternoon of training was imposed on us. Training to talk about the reform, one whose contours are so well defined that we have just been asked to invent its content… An inspector was leading (as we say today) the meeting. He was a character from a story. Snow Queen. Not the pre-pubescent Disney teenager, no. The real one, the one from the story, the bad one: bluish-silver hair, face of statue-like beauty, steely gaze. The high-pitched and falsely honeyed voice could not make us forget the hard determination in his icy eyes. So she tried, for an hour, to make us mistake pears for carrots and bladders for lanterns. No one was fooled, apart from a few colleagues who were completely derailed by the active propaganda we were subjected to. For others, the logorrhea of ​​the ministry does not succeed in erasing the reality that they see before their eyes on a daily basis. We don’t know where we’re going or if it can work, but we’re definitely going there. The famous level groups, which the French had taken for level classes, have become needs groups, built around skills. No one knows exactly what we’re talking about anymore.

I’ll spare you the detail. The conclusion is that we are changing the overall structure of classes of 6^e and 5^e, “we are deeply rethinking the act of teaching”, as the lady says, by manufacturing an absolute gas factory on the logistical level, to end up with… nothing, because in practice, what they are proposing is infeasible as it stands and will just be circumvented by pretty much all establishments still having a few sensible staff. We only gain a small reduction in numbers, since we create one more group than there are classes, for French and maths. With us, there are 25 per class. They will increase to 20 in French and maths. And that’s about it.

Even the inspector’s slides were approximate…

But we’ve already had 12 hours of meetings for that. The inspector delivered lies and untruths, dogmatic assertions and dubious approximations with admirable composure. Even his slides were approximate: spelling mistakes, unfinished sentences, missing words… What a lack of respect when you present yourself as an IPR (regional educational inspector) of letters and referent for the college to the academy in front of all staff in an establishment. At least we can read each other again, if we don’t have something specific to say. The recommendations? No more manuals, no more formative lessons, we guide the students too much, so we will have to let them do everything alone and just stay in supervision, and, in French, an entire term will have to be devoted exclusively to oral practice. Conclusion: a nameless mess, vague content, ever more inductive methods even though we claim to promote explicit methods, “entirely overhauled programs” in which many things are removed to leave room for “the work of the psycho-social skills” and exclusive attention paid to the students who are most in difficulty. Of the others, not a word. They only seem to exist to stimulate the weakest and, possibly, tutor them. After having deconstructed the heroes by showing us their doubts and their flaws in the cinema, we deconstruct the good student, of whom we wonder what he is doing there and why he would have the presumption to wait for us to teach him…

I raised the question of selection, which was at the heart of the first version of the reform, reminding the inspector that some of us were not ideologically unfavorable to it. His answer ? “Selection is a nauseating idea, and it is incompatible with the values ​​of the Republic. In the School of the Republic, we do not shoot students, so we do not select them…” I hesitated to retort that at the time Polytechnique, the ENS and the faculties of medicine were anti-republican, but as the reference to Auschwitz was marked, I considered that we had reached the Godwin point and that the discussion was closed. Parents will have some surprises at the start of the school year.

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