French students consistently perform poorly in international rankings – PISA for 15-year-olds in mathematics, science, adn reading comprehension; TIMSS for CM1 and 4th-grade students in mathematics and science; PIRLS for CM1 students in reading literacy. How did we arrive at this point? In principle, teh national education system is intended to provide equal opportunities for all young French people, regardless of their social background. yet,achievement gaps have widened in recent decades based on students’ social origins. Today’s school increasingly reproduces class inequalities, as we previously discussed.
In a dense and stimulating essay, Philippe nemo, director of the École professorale de paris and author of around twenty books, traces the history of schooling. Contrary to popular belief, the concept of a public education system provided by the state is relatively recent. For a long time, education (or rather, instruction) rested largely with the church, which embodied spiritual authority, while temporal power – that of kings – was limited to creating or encouraging certain scholarly institutions (Royal Collage, Academies, grandes écoles of engineering). This distinction is fundamental: the spiritual guided souls, while the temporal merely provided a framework without imposing a single morality.
Socialists,in fact,distorted the meaning of a “school of the Republic”
The essay reveals that the ideological turning point occurred after the French Revolution: the Jacobins wanted to establish a monopolistic public school system,marking a clear break with the beliefs of enlightenment thinkers. Socialists, in fact, distorted the meaning of a “school of the Republic,” transforming it into a…
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