Sarkozy in a moment of calm speaks about education
At this very moment (Saturday, November 17, 2007) Nicholas Sarkozy is in the long awaited fight for his political life. The "syndicats" that in France control the train, bus, and metro transportation sector, and therefore the working lives of millions of French people, are striking, and no one knows when and how it will all end. Will it be with a victory for the unions, or for the new government of Sarkozy, who has promised (as have the leaders of the syndicates that they) that he won’t back down?
But on September 4th of this year Sarkozy had education on his mind. This was just over two months ago, when things were quiet. No strikes yet, although rumblings were felt, and everyone knew that the big troubles were to come. But at this time before the storm the politicians were free and at leisure to make speeches saying pretty much whatever they wanted about whatever subject that interested them, knowing that until they talked about jobs and the economy their opponents were probably not listening anyway.
For his part, Sarkozy, taking advantage of the moment of calm, talked about education and chose to do so in the form of "une lettre aux enseignants," in which he summarized his "own," (or those of his advisors) beliefs about education.
For the most part the letter was boiler plate, full of non controversial, well worn clichés about education, probably not even of Sarkozy’s own devising but written for him by a team of educators. What was interesting to me was the fact that what he was saying could with very few changes have been said (and probably is being said) about our own kids, teachers, and schools.
I thought to myself, has the Western world finally reached agreement as to what the education of the young should be about?
Sarkozy’s letter to the teachers is long, some 23 pages and 6000 words, and I won’t attempt to summarize it. If you read French you can read it here. Its length probably means that just a few of the teachers, whose politics are probably well to the left of Sarkozy’s, have even read it.
Instead, I’d like to highlight just one point that Sarkozy makes, a true statement, I believe, about education, one that provides the grounds for the 100 year plus and still going conflict among our own endless line of educational reformers, the conflict between two valid but contradictory impulses in regard to what we should stress in the education of our young.
On the one hand we want to enable each child to find his/her own way, realize his/her potential. On the other hand we want to instill in the child, in the always admirable effort to promote and further our own civilization, our own values, our own ideas of what is just, true and beautiful. And there’s the rub, finding the middle ground between the two. The reformers too often go to one side or the other.
Isn’t it obvious that each child has his/her own way of being, thinking, feeling, and that he/she must be given the opportunity of expressing that way, almost whatever it may be? ("Chaque enfant, chaque adolescent a sa manière à lui d’être, de penser, de sentir. Il doit pouvoir l’exprimer.") But at the same time the same child must take, and make his/her own, a good amount of the extraordinary repository of skills and knowledge that the past has brought right up into the present. ("Mais il doit aussi apprendre.")
Still today our educational reformers seem to be on one side or the other, the progressive, child centered, or the conservative academic subject matter centered movements. I think of Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch. (See their "Bridging Differences," the Blog name implying their finally coming together, which they should, because in fact they’re both right.)
For too long our solutions to the seeming dilemma of what and how we should teach, such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, have favored one side (the child) or the other (the subject matter), and as a result have mostly had little positive effect on the school lives of our children.
