Upheaval in Slow Motion

Not since the days of Napoleon had the schools of France been threatened with such an upheaval. In the press, oldtime maitres d'ecole and professors were quick to cry alarm. The government, cried one, "is trying to force the schoolteachers of France to teach according to a pedagogical system. The metier of a professor is a liberal metier and it remains with each teacher to organize his own system of instruction." By last week the whole affair had split France's educators right down the middle.

The splitting began in the days of the German occupation when Frenchmen, brooding over their surrender, began to wonder just how good their education was. Napoleon's laws setting up the public lycees, passed in 1806, still stood. But since then a hodgepodge of other schools had mushroomed about the original system. For the most part, the children of laborers and farmers rarely got as far as the lycees. Those who did, some Frenchmen began to think, received such an overintellectualized brand of instruction that they emerged unfit for the day-today lives that most of them would lead.

In 1944 the government set up a commission headed by Professor Paul Langevin of the College de France to streamline the educational system. Three years later, the report was in, but it was not until last

December that Minister of Education Yvon Delbos plucked it out of its pigeonhole and decided to put it into effect.

If he succeeds, Delbos will standardize schooling for the first time. Children would go through six years of primary school heavily dosed with "learning by doing" methods. After that, there would be a two-year orientation program during which pupils would be thoroughly tested for aptitudes and abilities. At 14, pupils would branch off to manual trade schools, technical schools, or university preparatory schools.

A. committee of 73 educators, a council of ministers, and finally the French Assembly will still have to pass on the plan. All in all, it might be years before the upheaval actually took place. Meanwhile the antis comforted themselves with reflections on the French budget. Cried one schoolteacher: "Why worry about the project when the government hasn't the money to carry it out anyway?"

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