This interview appears in Le Monde de l'Éducation. If you are subscribed World, You can subscribe to this weekly letter by following this link.
Who had this crazy idea one day to invent schools? “No, it’s not Charlemagne. » And Jules Ferry did not make school compulsory any more than he emphasized the fundamentals “read, write, count”. No, the summer vacation dates have nothing to do with work in the fields. And the high school diploma is not “republican.”
The educational historian Claude Lelièvre denies that he wants to create a current book with him Today's school in the light of history (Odile Jacob editions, 320 pages, €22.90), each of the pedagogical totems he likes to scratch, each of the falsehoods he tries to dismantle, finds strong resonance in contemporary debates. This work of decipherment “historical fake news” about the educational institution, as he says, allows him to return to the sometimes forgotten sources of “The Republican School”.
Why this desire to write about historical falsehoods about school in 2021: Is the current time more conducive to these truncated images about the educational institution?
I wrote this work as a book about the history of education “for dummies”, but also to provide a kind of detox from historical “fake news” about the educational institution. Because there are many of them! Debates about schools are indeed passionate in France, and one or another's arguments regularly cite history in a somewhat quick and vague manner. This old trend gives vent to Epinal images at best, and untruths at worst, even among certain ministers.
This French passion for school can be explained by the political roles that were assigned to this very centralized institution very early on: maintaining through education the political order threatened by revolutions, ensuring the survival of a sputtering secularism vis-à-vis the Church, etc. Since then, it has There is no end to the debates and untruths surrounding the school. It took me about forty years to decipher them, put them together, and sometimes smile at them like I do in this book.
Of the 52 topics covered in your book, what do you think are the most important untruths?
They have to do with the character and philosophy of Jules Ferry, which have been highlighted regularly in recent times. We often hear that we should return to the “basic” teachings or “fundamentals” of Jules Ferry’s republican school, namely “Reading, Writing, Counting.” What a paradox when we know that the father of compulsory and free education repeatedly emphasized that his school differed from that of the Ancien Régime in that its aim was precisely to go beyond “reading, writing, counting”. More specifically, he wanted to reverse the hierarchy between “basic classes” and “secondary classes”: drawing, natural history, object lessons, etc.
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