In June 2022, the Ministry of Education (MEQ) published a study on the exits of secondary school students without a diploma or qualification: 10,050 in 2019-2020. It’s the equivalent of 10 schools with 1,000 students disappearing. It is like this every year. For what ?
Dropping out of school has two characteristics. It has always been concentrated in schools in underprivileged areas and affects more boys than girls. For them, socially conditioned, academic docility is the best way to succeed.
The MEQ establishes the annual programs which indicate what the teachers must teach and evaluate. A standard follows: that all students learn at the same pace and all take a year to assimilate the programs. As if that were possible! The inevitable failures and successes ensue. It is the fabrication of school failure.
You have to learn in step, as you walk in step. The lucidity or the blindness of the school, the happy or unhappy relationship with the institution, always linked to social determinism, requires to tear oneself away from the pedagogical sleep to become aware of both the functioning of the school and the school elimination children lacking the cultural capital required to succeed. Is school exclusion not the most violent and concrete form of rejection?
The MEQ imposes traditional pedagogy and, with it, the terrible indifference to the differences between students. School failure is part of this pedagogy, and its negative psychological effects on students, their self-image, their self-confidence, their social future contribute to abandonment. It is the pupils whose social conditions of existence are the most difficult who suffer from this violence of the school structures to which are added all the miseries and violence of their daily existence.
Here are examples of learning rhythms in underprivileged areas. A teenager in IIIe secondary, first in class, is absent more and more often. During the lessons, the teachers repeat three or four times what he understands the first time. He spends his time waiting. He finds a job and quits school. For his parents, it is a devastation.
A first year student has 100% in all his subjects. He only goes to school on exam days. His family situation encourages me to turn to the Department of Youth Protection (DPJ). He is quickly taken care of. A psychologist evaluates him; this child is gifted. At the age of 15, he was working. At school, he too spent his time waiting.
In a first-year class, a student doubles, curled up on his desk, his arm on his notebook to hide what he can’t do. He’s not lacking, but last year he couldn’t keep up with the class. He found himself faced with failures that destroyed him.
I visited a secondary school which, on the initiative of the teachers, adopted individualized pedagogy to counter academic failure. The student works in subject modules, consults with the teacher as needed, and takes exams when ready. Teachers told me that they would not return to traditional pedagogy. Academic results and the relationship with each student are important to them. What motivates students the most is not congratulations, but their success.
For several decades, in an underprivileged Parisian suburb, we have used, for learning to read and write for children aged 5 or 6, a didactics that allows teaching that respects the rhythms of learning. Everyone learns at their own time and at their own pace. Why not take inspiration from it and develop our own didactics for preschool and primary? For the secondary, the material already exists and can be used immediately.
We must put an end to school exclusion.