The School of Today
During the holidays, I finally took the time to read Claude Lelièvre’s L’École d’aujourd’hui à la lumière de l’histoire (published by Odile Jacob). It’s quite interesting that a book like this should illuminate the present in the light of the past, particularly in January, the month named after the god with two faces (Janus), one looking towards the year that is ending, the other towards the one that is beginning.
This two-way view invites us to revisit some of our preconceptions. For example, we like to think of the school of 1890, the school of the Third Republic, as the school of yesteryear, the school where we took the time to work on the basics, the famous “reading, writing and arithmetic”, for example. A school in which instruction rather than education prevailed. But I was surprised to discover that Jules Ferry’s school was quite the opposite.
In Jules Ferry’s time, people were already talking about the old methods:
“The men of the old regime in primary education are a little surprised by what we are doing; they are even a little shocked! But, they say, in the old days, with the old methods, with the curriculum restricted to reading, writing and arithmetic, didn’t we produce students who could read well, write correctly, count perfectly, count and write perhaps better than those of today, after a year or two of school? It’s possible; it’s possible that the education we want to give from the earliest years of schooling will be somewhat detrimental to what I called earlier the mechanical discipline of the mind. Yes, it is possible that after a year or two, our little children will be a little less familiar with certain reading difficulties; but there is a difference between them and the others: it is that those who are stronger in the mechanics understand nothing of what they read, whereas ours do. That is the spirit of our reforms. (Speech by Jules Ferry to the Pedagogical Congress of Primary Inspectors on 2 April 1880)
I even discovered that Jules Ferry was a proponent of modern methods, of active teaching methods that put the student at the heart of learning. In fact, in a conference to primary school teachers, his lieutenant, Ferdinand Buisson, argued that the best teaching method “is one that tells the teacher, you must get help with your task. And by whom? By the student himself. They are your most effective collaborators. Make sure that he is not subjected to instruction, but takes an active part in it […]. This is what distinguishes education from training: one develops natural dispositions, the other obtains only apparent results by means of mechanical processes”.
The present is nothing more than a perpetual reinvention, a recycling of the past, and our educational audacity is often nothing more than a resurrection of the experiments of yesteryear.
I wish you an excellent New Year.
