French high school student explains why it's time to revolutionize school
The future of schooling will be built by its students
Originally published on Medium in 🇫🇷. (This version was translated to English on Deepl.com without me double checking for weird sentences & spelling- busy doing other things!)
"What everyone calls "education" is a machine to manufacture soldiers for the economy and not future accomplished human beings, capable of thinking, criticizing, creating, mastering and managing their emotions. To educate can then be summed up as deforming to format and make conform.
The worst of all is to have made schools, places where we compete against each other. In this race for diplomas, we are selecting the most dangerous people, those who will no longer be able to imagine, because they will be submissive and conform to the system. Thus the "best" will become predators, killers, and the others will become consumers, fully prepared to obey the institutions. The importance given to the intellect to the detriment of the intelligence of the hands, to which we owe our evolution, is a catastrophe which makes us cripples without us being aware of it.
The concrete relationship with nature is also indispensable, for it is to nature that the child owes his life, throughout his entire existence; to take advantage of a vital principle without knowing it is a monumental error.
True education would be to give the taste to invest, to experiment, to help beings to reveal their unique personality and to prepare them for life within life thanks to others.
It is this school that science must found. Only then will social interests be definitively reversed. Society will be made for the school and not the school for society.”
Text composed by the exhibition "Aux Tableaux" from written or oral extracts by P. Rhabi ; A. Jacquard ; A. Dupontel ; I. Illich ; G. Bachelard
According to a Unicef report, France is ranked 35th out of 37th in terms of educational inequality in OECD countries.
I would like to share with you my feelings and those of many of my friends who go to school every day. To our great regret, we are never asked our opinion even though we are the first ones concerned by the decisions taken in the field of education.
We spend 12 years of our life at school and it is a nightmare for many of us. The education that we undergo throughout our schooling is, in my opinion, not given in the right way. Indeed, I see many students around me who are literally sinking under the pressure that is put on them. Grades, the way teachers give their lessons... I expose here the negative points of the current French education system.
Notation
As soon as we enter primary school, we are compared, put in competition, and forbidden to make mistakes due to grading. Learning is no longer a pleasure, but a way to get a good score and to avoid pressure from teachers or parents. We no longer learn because it is interesting, but to be the best at the test.
The school system pushes students to cheat by emphasizing achievement over learning. We are constantly being put down, no one cares how much effort we put in, it's just about the final grade.
Teachers
Teachers are mostly discouraging, some even traumatizing. They don't give you a chance, and are themselves (for the most part) disgusted by their profession, and this is our example, adults who have lost all desire to pursue their profession.
Respect is their motto, but if only it could be reciprocated. I believe I am capable of thinking, speaking, and arguing just as an adult would be capable of, but since my status is that of a student, I have to put up with it and look down when I am ridiculed by a teacher. I don't see respect but submission.
The blame is always put on our lack of work, but never on the quality of the courses we receive.
Yes, there are good teachers. Who support us and help us. And we thank them. We even remember them all our lives, according to my mother. Unfortunately they are too rare.
Classes
We are totally passive in front of the lessons we receive. The pedagogy is bad. We are asked to learn by heart things that we don't even understand, rather than teaching us to analyze and argue.
The lessons are made only of theory, but in order to interest us, it would be necessary to concretize all these formulas and to show us how will it be useful to us later, question to which the professors are not able to answer us.
Adolescence is a difficult period. School should be a reassuring place, a place where one can forget about their daily problems, but it is often from this place that the malaise of young people comes from.
We need to reinvent school, to start all over again. For the sake of the future generations.