The Politics of Reform and Nonreform in French Education

Abstract

Educational reforms have a mixed record of success in getting beyond paper on which they have been conceived and designed. For a variety of reasons, educational systems and political fabric that surrounds, supports, and constrains them tend to be remarkably impervious to major change and seem to have a striking capacity to bounce back into their original shape after each attempt to revamp them. Exceptions, such as Swedish school reform in 1960s and partial success of going comprehensive in Britain, would seem to confirm rule for which developments in Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, Belgium, and a good many Third World countries provide ample evidence. There are few places, however, where this resistance to change is more striking than in contemporary France, where, over a period of now almost 30 years, an enormous proliferation of reform proposals has more or less peacefully coexisted with an extremely limited degree of actual change in educational system. Beginning with reforms proposed by Berthoin in 1959 (for which groundwork had been laid in immediate postwar years), a series of more or less fundamental proposals for reforming some part or other of French educational system has ranged clear across history of Fifth Republic: Fouchet in 1963, Fontanet in 1973, Haby in 1975, Savary in 1981, Chevenement in 1984, and (memories of a stormy November on streets of Paris!) Monory and Devaquet in 1986-they all, with varying degrees of rigor mortis, have joined what a commentator in Le Monde has called the cemetery of reform projects, dead even before they were handed down to posterity with name of their author attached.9