Education: New Spirit in France

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Right from grade one the French believe in making schoolchildren work hard. At nine, a French child is already being stuffed with Chateaubriand and Rousseau; he parses sentences from Hugo and learns all about the Edict of Nantes. At 14, he must begin to dip (in English) into the works of Swift and Poe. By the time he gets to his "baccalaureat" exam, he must know his Tacitus and answer such questions as "What did P. A. Touchard mean when he said of Montaigne: 'Before everything and despite everything, Montaigne is alive'?"

Many a French educator has begun to regard this curriculum as lopsided—a holdover from the days when most students were of the wealthy and professional classes. In stuffy, stagnant classrooms, teachers have paid little attention to the individual student, treating them all as so many minds to be crammed for the dreaded "bachot." And each year, as many as 60% of their pupils have flunked the exam.

Last week the Ministry of National Education was ready with a sweeping new plan: next fall the schools would begin to have a new atmosphere. Since 1945, France has been experimenting with special "classes nouvelles." These have proved so successful that the ministry is extending their methods throughout the secondary schools.

The whole idea of the classe nouvelle, each limited to 30 students, is to tailor education to the abilities of the individual. Teachers supervise every child, hold private talks with him, then with his parents. For the first time, a full psychological dossier, carefully noting his outstanding talents and troubles, is kept on each pupil.

Instead of merely assigning students big swatches out of textbooks, the classe nouvelle first teaches them how to study: how to use a dictionary, take notes, boil material down to essentials. Trying to breathe new life into old subjects, teachers organize field trips to museums, factories, galleries. Homework is reduced in favor of class projects, manual training, undergraduate magazines and newspapers. By last week, France felt that it had gone a long way in sweeping some of the cobwebs out of the classroom. But that did not mean that the traditional curriculum was being thrown out entirely. After all, said one ministry official, "we can't go too far. We can't have children leaving school without proper knowledge. But we can change the spirit in which they acquire that knowledge."