Education: France: The Hope of Reform

The rebel students of Paris are threatening to take to the barricades again when their classes reconvene in November. Nonetheless, there is rising hope throughout France that relative peace may prevail in its chaotic university system. The optimism rests mainly on the promises and proficiency of Charles de Gaulle's agile new Minister of Education, Edgar Faure.

Faure has opened a frank, sympathetic dialogue with student and faculty dissidents. One of his most effective arguments in their view is that he is "presiding over the disappearance in its present state" of the Education Ministry itself. A prime—and wholly legitimate—target of the uprising was the ministry's total dominance of all public education. Some 2,000 functionaries, operating out of a musty building on Paris' Left Bank, control all decisions on curriculum, examinations, admissions and facilities.

Installed in the Bastille. "In the future," pledges Faure, the ministry "will serve as an interlocutor between the universities and the government—but never again as a dictator." As proof of his intentions, he brought in as his top adviser one of the ministry's chief antagonists: Gerald Antoine, rector of Orleans-Tours University. Says Antoine: "A good way to take over the Bastille is to be installed within it."

Faure's open approval of many rebel goals has shocked some Gaullist legislators, as well as traditionalist bureaucrats and scholars. "The Napoleonic conception of the centralized, authoritarian university is outdated," he told the National Assembly last month. "The little empires, the little feudalisms in certain sectors of higher education and research have shown their senility." Faure concedes the validity of student complaints that the examination system is obsolete and arbitrary and that the facilities are inadequate and overcrowded. He is pushing for exams that would be more frequent but more fair, based on testing working knowledge of a subject rather than on rote memorization. He also has promised to provide space for 20,000 new students in Paris this fall.

With the help of manifestos issued by student revolutionary groups, Faure has set aides to work on a "master" education law that will be proposed to the Assembly next month. He plans to recommend the creation of smaller universities (10,000 to 12,000 students each) with American-style academic departments and a de-emphasis of lectures in favor of more "research, discussion, dialogue." He also hopes to prepare more students for these universities by accenting modern science and living languages, rather than classics and Latin, in the lycees (secondary schools).