Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on March 22, 2022. It was translated into English from French by the Observatory before being edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
“Why is it written like that?” All teachers know that children ask many questions. In France, as abroad, in wealthy backgrounds, and in working-class neighborhoods, the curiosity and candor of students are universal. The school, which is struggling to assert itself in the presidential campaign, has the magnificent ambition of responding to this curiosity by developing the potential of each child.
It is clear that this promise is not being fulfilled in the same way everywhere in the country: strong inequalities persist despite numerous initiatives by public authorities. Beyond the additional dedicated resources, such as doubling classes in CP and CE1 in priority education areas, reducing inequalities can only be achieved by leveling up requirements.
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Adapting Knowledge to the Audience: The Inequality Trap
The difficulties that arise seem to push textbook publishers and some teachers to adapt teaching to the supposed audience. Thus, a teacher uses rap to teach French to his students, while a teaching resource considers SMS language as a mediation support for “entering writing,” while a conference encourages teaching with television series, which is useful for teaching history-geography or chemistry.
While it is not a question of judging intentions on the issues of methods consisting of interesting children in studies with elements supposed to come from their cultural bath, one can legitimately worry about the emergence of this new knowledge to the detriment of classic authors like Flaubert or Proust. The final result is all too often dramatic: students are locked into predefined roles, incapable by nature and a priori of taking pleasure in reading demanding texts, and assigned to study only extracts from newspapers.
Similarly, Latin or Old French are, for example, totally invisible in certain professional or technological courses. What does the French teacher answer to the legitimate question of a child who asks: “why is it written oi and pronounces wa ? ». Should he oppose the automatic logic of a spell checker (“that’s how it is”) to children and adolescents who rightly expect their teachers to answer questions appropriate to their age?
The comments made by Omar Sy in a television program in January 2019 are, in this respect, revealing: “In Trappes, I was very good […], I was among the top of my class, the best grades, congratulations everywhere […]. And when I’arrives in the high school which changes a little social class […] for me, I am a genius […]. But in fact I am average my friend, I’I have nothing’a genius, because everything that’we m’learned, c’is stuff for dummies. […] Do you realize that’a good student at Trappes, c’is an average student in truth. In fact, we have invented a world.”
Breaking Social Reproduction
The lack of demand first penalizes the most modest: it is generally not at home that they go to read Montaigne or Montesquieu, and the deficit of cultural capital causes the social reproduction described by Passeron and Bourdieu.
Contrary to popular belief and as noted in a recent field study that we conducted in working-class neighborhoods in the Paris region, parents of students demand discipline, a firm and caring framework, as well as learning a culture perceived as classical and elitist for their children. They are fully aware of the symbolic value of school, as one of the people interviewed, Fatma, sums up: “I always tell my children that my dream would be to be in their place. We didn’t have the chance to go to school for long.”
If school crystallizes a privileged path of emancipation, it is also the place of disappointment: the culture of “care”, with which some parents are not familiar, creates a misunderstanding and the feeling of a lack of authority: “we find excuses for them, we tell them that it is not good… But that’s all, without action, without being severe.” Finally, parents themselves deplore the adaptation of programs to school environments, which can be perceived as a form of betrayal, as Fatoumata indicates without circumlocution: “one day my daughter Haby told me that they listened to Maître Gims at school […], I am sure that they do not do that in other schools where there are no foreigners.”
In the eyes of many families in working-class neighborhoods, school is still the place where we learn the culture and language of our country. In order not to disappoint them, let us remind everyone that we must be more careful than ever not to fall into easy solutions: let us transmit our culture with confidence to free and raise all our children, including those from modest backgrounds who do not deserve to be excluded.
Image: kasto — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 460085365
