France Scores An F in Education

[cowcommander]

Source: Time

At a time when nations including the U.S. and Britain have made a priority of fixing their school systems, this French way of doing things could, in an ideal world, be a model.

But if France, with its high national standards, is a model at all, it turns out to be a severely dysfunctional one — and nobody is more worried about that than the French themselves, who until recently used to boast about having the best educational system in the world.

...

The biggest recent showdown came in the late 1990s, when then Education Minister Claude Allègre, a socialist, branded the educational establishment "a mammoth" and vowed to cut it back. After mass street protests against his plans brought the country to a halt, Allègre got the chop. Since then his successors have been far more cautious in their reform efforts.

...

One issue that's rarely addressed in the national debate about education is a factor that is immediately apparent to any foreigner coming into contact with the French school system: the unforgiving classroom culture that continues to hold sway in most schools. The emphasis is so heavily placed on the transmission of knowledge that basic pedagogical notions like motivating students to perform well are given short shrift.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2021009-1,00.html

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The problems with education isn't just an American thing, it's a worldwide issue.

[FiveGoodMen]

1. So the French education system is a "Mammoth" that only cares about imparting knowledge?

What a disaster!

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. You're OK with this, then?

Among the findings: one-fifth of 11-year-olds finishing primary school still have serious difficulty with reading and writing. By the age of 16, almost as many — about 18% — leave school with no formal qualifications whatsoever. In international comparative tests of 15-year-olds, France's overall scores are at best mediocre and have been dropping abruptly in the past decade. Even at the top end, the proportion of brightest kids is lower than it is in many other countries, especially Finland. Most shocking of all, for a nation reared on the concept of égalité, is that school in France isn't the great leveler it was supposed to be, but actually perpetuates social differences. Increasingly it is a place where children from poor backgrounds do far worse than kids from better-off backgrounds. An analysis by McKinsey & Co. shows that the performance of French schoolkids can vary widely depending on their socioeconomic background: especially in math, race and class affect scores even more markedly than they do in the U.S., where the gulf between white, black and Hispanic students has been widely documented.

[FiveGoodMen]

8. Admittedly, I didn't read the article, but the snips just sounded like silly propaganda

Why not quote the substance if there is any?

[onehandle]

2. So what grade does this guy give the U.S. school system?

Because our system is hardly a good example in any way.

[mediaman007]

6. Much of our system functions perfectly well.

Perhaps we could add a little dose of "start school ready to learn" and a dash of "take advantage of the opportunities our schools provide."

[Doremus]

4. My, my, how timely. A hatchet job on the French schools because they won't reform :::rolls eyes:::

So convenient!

:eyes:

[hack89]

7. Their system is corporate America's wet dream

centrally run, micro-managed with every kid being taught the same thing at the same time, no room for individuality, no allowances for differences between kids.

Perfect industrial age education system producing low esteem, malleable drones.

[Dappleganger]

5. There is a huge immigrant population in France which is

being shafted. What immigrant child wants to do well in school if they know that there are no jobs for THEM?? It's not just 1st gen immigrants, but 2nd and 3rd as well. Many of those kids drop out.

[Imajika]

9. Education is in the cross hairs because it is expensive...

We are going to see much more of this since pretty much the entire western world is having severe financial problems.

Education is just really expensive, and when politicians/people are looking for places to cut they will look to education spending as a target.

[The Northerner]

10. +1

[Spazito]

11. Education is a convenient political 'football', imo...

The only time the issue of education hits the mainstream is prior to an election and that happens in many countries not just in the U.S. After the election, it gets dropped so fast, by everyone, not just the politicians themselves, it makes one's head spin.