The agreements were therefore negotiated after a historic strike, but they are struggling to be approved by the members of the unions who concluded them. It is rare and astonishing. These agreements, which nevertheless seem satisfactory in terms of salaries, provide ways of resolving the serious and recurring problem of the composition of the class which was at the heart of the conflict.
The least we can say is that these solutions do not seem to be perceived by the parties concerned as being able to resolve it. They do not arouse the desired interest and, notwithstanding the planned bonuses, there is no rush to support students who urgently need it. The catch-up plan will undoubtedly need to be revised.
Part of the explanation for all this is that we are understaffed. Another – crucial and which must be remembered – is that our school system, with its heavily subsidized private sector, is very unequal, which means that a disproportionate number of students in difficulty end up in the public network, which struggles to meet their needs, which encourages parents to go to the private sector, which makes it more difficult for the public to meet the needs of its students, which….
But let’s take a little step back from all this, a little philosophical step back.
School and society
School, a central institution of democratic life, can and even must contribute to the health of political life, particularly by training citizens. But it cannot create political life, and even less resolve its most fundamental questions. To play its role, it therefore needs a vision and a minimum political consensus. This helps to define it and protects it from certain tensions and controversies.
From this point of view, I think that what the school system would say to us right now, if we listened at all attentively, would be: solve your political problems, don’t send them to us and ask us to do it at your place, it is not our role and we are not able to do it anyway. But we can’t function and do what we need to do if you don’t address them, if broad social and political consensus hasn’t been reached on these big normative issues that define what we should be.
Examples ? What value do we place on education? How do we train enough teachers? Is the subsidized private sector acceptable? Secularism, and which one, applies to whom and how? What is our ideal as citizens and by what knowledge is it formed? What equality of opportunity should we aim for and how? Tell us all this and more.
The community and — not just — politics must answer such questions so that the school can exist and fulfill its vital functions.
The news reminds us of this again at the moment with the very divisive question of immigration. We talk about it a lot in the delicate issue of the housing crisis. But the school cannot ignore it. It enters into it from all sides, notably through the composition of the classes, through the language which is spoken almost everywhere in the school and through the values, sometimes divergent, of certain groups on various subjects.
To decide what the school should be and, consequently, do — on very concrete things like the curriculum that should be transmitted and the type of citizens that it should train — it must know what the community has decided for her on a large number of delicate preliminary questions. What idea of the nation does it embody? Is citizenship multicultural? Intercultural? Identity? And secularism? What place do we give to the nation, according to the meaning we give it, in the teaching of history or literature? In the organization of space, should there be prayer rooms or not? Does all this apply to all schools, private and public, or only to some of them? Tell us.
Swimming blind
As long as we do not have, as is too often the case at the moment, clear answers to these questions and many others of a similar nature, the school does its best to function by improvising answers. to questions she doesn’t have to answer. And without these answers, which must come from politics, it cannot fully play its role.
Let’s recognize it: politics no longer does it or does it badly. So we are swimming blind, doing our best. The profession is deserted, the solutions imagined do not work and satisfy almost no one, due to the lack of a widely consensual normative ideal. How to find it?
I persist and sign: without a Parent 2.0 commission, without this vast and serious collective reflection on education, on what it should be according to us and for us, we will continue to face these impasses.
And to others, no doubt, that we do not suspect.