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| Monday, 13 September 2004 |
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Taking up the challenge of equal opportunities by Kathy Crapez One of the principal tasks of French State Education is to offer everyone, the opportunity to succeed and to raise their social status. Despite obvious successes in terms of the democratisation of schooling, a reduction in the numbers leaving without any qualifications and a higher general level of education inequalities in school careers and success due to social background and gender persist. Some analyse. School is not "all powerful" in fighting social, gender and cultural inequalities, as Marie Duru-Bellat, sociologist and researcher at the French institute for research into the economics of education (IREDU-CNRS), reminds us, for "It is lodged in a society in which there are inequalities from the start and in getting somewhere". Academic inequalities take root very early and largely depend on material and cultural inequalities between families. Thus children from deprived backgrounds, broken homes (divorce, new family relationships, single-parent homes) or whose parents have few qualifications more often repeat a year at primary school and perform less well in mathematics and French on entry to secondary school. Children more or less ready for school The over-representation of foreign children or the children of immigrants among problem pupils is because most of them are working class. Pupils start school unequal in what are called the "prerequisites" depending on their cultural baggage.
As the work of the progressive sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has shown since the 1960s and 1970s, not only does school not succeed in correcting social inequality,but it contributes to ensuring it continues. By treating pupils on principle as if they were equal, it in fact advantages "the privileged", those whose socialisation in the family has already prepared them for learning. Moreover, it legitimises these social inequalities by converting them into inequalities at school. Faced with this phenomenon, the necessity of implementing a policy of positive discrimination was gradually impressed on the authorities and resulted in the creation of Educational Priority Zones (ZEP) in 1981, extended into priority educational networks from 1998. Based on the idea that to be fair, it is essential "to give most to those who have least", areas where the school failure-rate is high and which stand out for their social and economic problems - particularly the outer suburban estates of the big cities - have been given additional human and financial resources. A compensation policy undermined by family attitudes The ZEPs also have greater autonomy in deciding which methods they will use in practice to fight school failure. Taking the view that school problems cannot be separated from the overall environment of the pupils, they are developing partnerships with local councils, voluntary organisations and local cultural facilities, especially libraries. Inequalities in success have been shown to be cumulative throughout a child's school career. This is why, despite the fact that virtually all working-class children now start secondary school since the 'college unique' (comprehensive school) was introduced in 1975, they repeat years more often and are more often directed to the technical stream, traditionally undervalued in France. Similarly although the Baccalaureate is now open to all social classes, more than 80% of managers' children obtain it, compared with only 52% of the children of workers (young people starting secondary school in 1989), and most of these take a vocational baccalaureate. These disparities in paths through school also result from family attitudes that differ with social class. We see self-selection by children of working-class families who opt for short courses because of the inability to earn caused by deferred entry to the labour market. Introduced in order to fight career inequalities and encourage the intermixing of pupils, the 'college unique' is circumvented by socially advantaged families, who know their way round the educational system. Their children, particularly through a wise choice of options (foreign and classical languages) are found on the most highly valued courses. Lastly, young people being educated at their neighbourhood school, in accordance with the schools catchment-area system practised in France, the low level of social mixing, especially in big-city districts, is reflected in the schools. Yet, according to Marie Duru-Bellat, "heterogeneousness is a vector of equality". Socially mixed classes are more favourable to the success of every pupil and not only avoid the stigmatisation of low ability classes, but also the negative behaviours this engenders (deviant behaviour, violence, withdrawn behaviour etc.) Thus, too often,the weakest pupils from the most deprived backgrounds have the additional handicap of being on the least valued courses and in the poorest performing establishments to which newly qualified teachers are appointed, although these are pupils most in need of good and experienced teachers. Hence the suggestion from reforming sociologists of allocating the most experienced teachers to problem pupils. According to these experts, among them Francois Dubet, author of the report on secondary schools for the Ministry of National Education in 1999, all these measures, while necessary, will not be enough to prevent the need for a general policy to fight social inequalities. Fighting widespread sexism Long hidden or considered as minor compared to social inequality, gender inequalities have not been studied in France since about twenty years ago, mainly because co-educational schooling was only made compulsory in 1976. Despite girls' higher academic achievement at every level of the eduction system, borne out especially by the work of sociologists Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet', they obtain less benefit from it. certainly they repeat the year less often and obtain better results from primary school, the foundation of their future success; they do better than boys at secondary school certificate and the Baccalaureate. But once at the lycee (senior high school) at an equal level of achievement, girls are less likely than boys to choose the selective courses valued in the labour market. Indeed, they are under-represented in the scientific and industrial streams and over-represented in the literary and service-industry streams which are less valued in terms of jobs. This self-election by girls comes in large part from the persistence in society of stereotypes about the roles of the sexes, which carry weight when making choices about which course to take. Thus, a convention to promote equal opportunities between boys and girls, men and women in National Education, set up by the Government in 2000, launched a number of information campaigns about mixed sexes in jobs and scientific, technological and professional careers aimed at families and young people. Indeed, it revealed that teachers' attitudes do not counter balance a limiting family influence on the academic career paths of girls. Nicole Mosconi, professor of educational sciences at the University of Nantere, has shown that teachers interact more with boys, confining girls to a more passive role. So a training drive for National eduction personnel has been implemented, and since 2001, university institutes of education (IUFM) have been including the gender dimension in their teaching training courses. Faced with coeducational disadvantages for girls, who are not only said to self-censor in the presence of boys in classroom dynamics, but are also the object of specific attacks by them, some have recently suggested ending this system. Others, like Marie Duru-Bellat, envisage temporarily separating the sexes for some subjects, "in order to make it easier, for example, for boys to express themselves in French lesson and allow girls access to the machines in science and technical lessons." But to stop mixing boys and girls at school would be mistake, because it enables them to learn about sexual equality and a mixed society. Courtesy: Label France |
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The language used at school, for example, is the mother tongue of the
educated classes. Similarly the "flexible" child-rearing style
of comfortably-off families encourages more intellectual curiosity and
adaptation to what is expected at school than the "rigid"
child-rearing style of working-class families.
