What schools for
tomorrow?
Modern teaching methods to the rescue
of schooling for all
Traditional teaching
methods, characterised by an authoritative relationship and the principle of the teacher
who dispenses knowledge to a pupil supposed to be ready to receive it, today seems
unsuitable for mass education. The young people now entering secondary education come from
a family environment that has not prepared them for the "role of pupil" and who
are more exposed to school failure. To face the challenge presented by the democratisation
of schooling, French "education experts" are proposing some innovative
approaches.
Kathy Crapez, Doctoral student in
Political Scienceat the University of Paris-IX-Dauphine
Educational methods, that "practical
theory" – neither art nor science but a "programme of action", as
sociologist Emile Durkheim defined it – outlines responses to problems raised by the
democratisation of schooling undertaken in France since immediately after the war and
which gathered pace in the 1980s and 1990s, with the government’s stated aim of
bringing 80% of young people in each year group up to the Baccalauréat.Faced with the
problems posed by mass education, current educational theories place "the pupil at
the centre of the educational system" – a principle also enshrined in the
Education law of 1989 – and recommend starting from the child’s own centres of
interest to put him in a position to learn1. In recent years this approach has been
translated in France by introducing children’s literature in the primary school and
supervised individual work at the high school – in the form of completing a project
on a subject that interests the pupil – or by using new technologies. All these are
ways designed to reconcile young people with learning.
Rethinking methodsThese mediating approaches
also attempt to fight boredom at school, which expresses itself not only in lack of
interest – one of the principal causes of academic failure – but also in
violence. According to the Swiss educational historian, Charles Magnin, the boredom of
pupils today results from the loss of the meaning of education in society: "School is
no longer necessarily legitimate. Today, knowledge is perceived as above all functional
and immediately usable." While school alone cannot reinforce the social value of
education, it is, on the other hand, in a position to restore meaning to academic
knowledge.The promotion of the interdisciplinary approach – so praised by the
sociologist Edgar Morin2 and adopted especially in the context of introductory courses at
secondary school - seeks to combat the partitioning of subjects and the increased
specialis ation of knowledge, stressing their interdependence. For example, the
interdisciplinary nature of mathematics and the experimental sciences (physics and
biology) makes it possible not only to work with common tools (calculation) but to break
away from an abstract approach to mathematics by showing its practical uses.One leading
source of innovative ideas about ways to change state schooling, "differentiated
teaching", developed in the 1970s by Louis Legrand, a researcher at the French
national institute of educational research (INRP, see box), aims to adapt teaching methods
to the different types of pupils, in order to increase equality of opportunity and reduce
school failure, still largely determined by social inequalities (see article pp. 20-21).
In this respect this modern method of teaching champions the guiding of students’
work through tutorials or advice on methodology – which has been partly taken up with
the creation of support groups in high schools – so that the school can be "its
own resource", to use the expression coined by Philippe Meirieu, professor of
educational sciences, considered to be the French expert on educational methods. This is
to ensure that pupils from privileged backgrounds are not the only ones to benefit from
additional support, especially through private lessons.
Taking account of the pupil as a wholeBut the
diversity of pupils is not only social, as psychology has shown, inviting us also to take
account of young people’s affectivity, a potential source of impediments to learning.
From this viewpoint, those educationalists labelled "reformers", advocate giving
up the traditional system of marks for pupils’ final work in favour of continuous and
constructive assessment, capable of highlighting the progress made. "Instructive
assessment" would also make it possible to limit the negative effects that bad marks
have on pupils, especially their demotivating impact.In order to make allowance for the
biological rhythms and developmental stages of the child highlighted by the Swiss
psychologist, Jean Piaget, a policy of arranging school timetables has been developed
which has lightened the working day of pupils in primary schools since 1980, and in
secondary schools from the 1990s.Another aspect now called into question is the
organisation of pupils into fixed and predetermined classes. Differentiated education
suggests replacing this system by large groups of three or four classes, divided,
depending on pupils’ needs, into groups of different sizes. These groups would be
temporary, not only to allow for progress made by young people in the learning process,
but also to avoid locking them up in a stigmatising group (the slow-learners group). This
arrangement implies, moreover, new school timetables. Lastly, it entails training teachers
in educational culture, team working and their new responsibilities for the all-round
education of pupils. A thorough overhaul of their training has begun with the university
institutes of education (IUFM, see box) and the revision of school timetables is
continuing.These proposals, some of which have not yet been implemented in practice,
profoundly call into question the way schools are organised and the conception of the
teacher’s role, no longer centred only on the transmission of a body of knowledge,
but also incorporating pupil guidance and their education in the broad sense, in other
words, their socialisation. This definition of the teacher’s job and their duties at
school is not unanimously accepted, but it is, and has been for several years, behind an
increasing number of successful experimental pilot schemes.
(Courtesy: Label France Magazine,
Embassy of France, Kathmandu) |
