Donnie Darkos: The French Paradox

The crowd is teeming in front of the old, majestic building. Betwixt the crowd passes a stirring, a murmuring; a certain electricity in the air. Why are they here? What’s going on? Why can’t they get into the imposing building in front of them? The crowd is comprised mostly of students, young adults who are fresh-faced and ready to face the world that their forefathers have laid out in front of them. Slowly but surely, a cry builds up from their bowels. A murmuring becomes a wave of sound, voices slowly raise up and cry in union…

DARKOS ENCULÈ!

The crowd goes wild! Laughs! Cheers! Screams of the paranoid insecurity that only those at that curious age could feel! Then they look around, unsure of themselves. Something has disturbed them, but what? For what reason? A boy in the crowd turns to his friend; “Hey, who the fuck is Darkos?”

This was the scene that greeted me on Tuesday morning in front of school as I tried to go to class. This is of course the student revolution in France that has risen up to combat the education reforms in France as being implemented by the French education minister Darkos. Yeah, I know. He sounds like the villain from some lame fantasy movie.

We had already experienced some minor uprising on Monday morning, as bright eyed and fresh faced, we went outside at 10 am to socialise and were greeted with a bunch of midgets hurling firecrackers at people. Oh, you crazy shiners, you. It was all fun and games until they came back on Tuesday morning to throw firecrackers at us again and one went off next to my frikkin’ EAR. But I digress.

I actually felt quite positive about these demonstrations. I am usually rather skeptical about student activism over here, especially in Béziers as most people getting out there are looking for an excuse to skip school and generally fuck around. But this seemed different: people actually seemed to care about what was going on because it affected their little brothers or sisters. It really seemed as if the student body of France had had enough of being pushed around by the government. It also bore exactly the sort of trademarks I look for when it comes to open revolution; the internet was only being used to keep people informed and to organize things and everyone I talked to was advocating active and open dissent and civil disobedience. What more could you want in a coup d’état?

But alas, all solid plans eventually go to waste. The student body is incredibly sloppy when it comes to organising such endeavours: a blocus (barricade) was supposed to be set up on the Tuesday: it comprised of several dustbins and a handful of arseholes trying to stop people from getting past. Luckily they rectified this problem on the Thursday, constructing metal grills and proper barricades on the stairs so that people were unable to get in. They actually did a decent enough job when it came to blocking up the school. At 9am we marched to Jean Moulin to “re-inforce” the barricades there, to find that half of the so-called “activists” were a bunch of 16-19 year old potheads who weren’t actually sure WHY they were demonstrating. They thought that Darkos was a character from Star-Wars. Oh, the horror. Nor did the sit-in in front of the mayor’s office (though I was not present, I had given up in exasperation) any use. They didn’t do anything. They just sat in front of the town hall and shouted obscenities at the police and mayor. No violence, nothing.

I mean what the fuck?! Did Che Guevara defeat Batista with harsh language? Did the Bolsheviks take over Russia with insults? I think not. Yet we’re here facing the pinnacle of apathy: people are happy to lend their support unless they think they’ll get arrested for it.

‘”Ah, but James!” you say, “Why were YOU not out there, molotov cocktail in bag and AK 47 in hand?! Why were YOU not killing cops left and right?” Well, dude. Come on, if you’re going to revolt at least make it for something worth while. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for student activism concerning the education reforms, but I don’t think an open revolution will change it. I’m simply trying to stereotype the mentality of the people who were protesting this week.

This has manifested itself perfectly today: half of the people want to keep the barricades up, half of them want to take them down. As I sit here writing this, I feel regret. Regret that the student body, while willing, is still horribly disorganized. How can we stand up for our rights if we can’t even agree on basic agendas? How can we do anything if we’re squabbling between ourselves?

How depressing.

Till next time,

James

We’re the last of our kind…

Before I begin this post, I’d like to draw your attention to a… well, a HORRIBLY ignorant comment by pineapple dictator, mafioso and Italian president Benito Mussolini about Barack Obama.

Oh lawd.  Obama is tanned?

Anyways, that was kind of relevant because it came up in a conversation with my History teacher, with whom I discussed the following subject on.  And here we go.

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The current generation of students in the French education system are going through a Kevin Costner sort of thing at the moment; we’re not the Last of the Mohicans, but we are the last of our kind.

If you haven’t been keeping up to date with the latest comings and goings of French politicis, allow me to shine a little light on what a mess it’s become.  I currently study under the age-old, tried and tested Baccalauréat system.  Over the past 18 years, I’ve studied under English curriculum and French and I’ve gotta say that out of the two I prefer the French system because of the freedom it gives students when it comes to actually choosing where they want their life and their studies to go.  The great thing about the French system is that it allows and in fact encourages children to recognize their weaknesses and exploit their strengths.  For example, two years ago I was getting nowhere in Economic studies.  I was pretty terrible at maths, physics and biology so I decided to change to a litterature orientation.  It helped immensly as the scientific subjects were brought down to a level I could understand and I concentrated more on languages.  This is the essence of the French system; children can fully exploit the potential and work towards a chosen career point without any hassle.

But all that is about to change, with the latest set of education reforms that will change the Bac as we know it.  The French education minister lately described the most scientific orientation as being “elitist” giving her a precedent to criticize and pursue for reforming the French education system.  For many years now, there has been a great inequality in terms of the repartition between different orientations at least in the general sector.  This year in my school, there are only 40 pupils out of a good few hundred studying litterature; the rest pursue Economy or Sciences.  Many politicians have now started to ask if the system is working out, with students going for the most “popular” studies out there.  That means they’re trying to get rid of the BAC.

Essentially, the BAC climaxes in June of each academic year when the students of the Première and Terminale undergo a set of exams to determine their aptitude in the subjects they take and to determine whether or not they can get into university.  At the moment universities in France accept candidates based on their Bac results: a more prestiguous university such as the Sorbonne will accept only the best candidates while other more localized universities will take most people.  Fair enough.  The bac has always been criticized as being too expensive to set up; schools have to accomodate all students from surrounding schools for several weeks; supplies are expensive and hiring the correctors is too.  The new system being proposed is essentially based on the American system (thanks, Sarkozy).  The June bac will be scrapped and now students will be tested over the course of the year and released into the wild based on the average of their results.  But that’s not all that’s being changed.  Students will now be able to have a lot more “freedom” in how they pursue their studies.  There will be 21 hours of mandatory lessons, followed by a number of optional lessons.  The crazy thing is that the optional lessons include History, Geography and the respetive sciences.  For example, if a student wants to do History but not Geography, they don’t have to.  This idea is completely insane, as these lessons are mutually exclusive; there’s no point in studying the history of a country if you can’t place it on a map.

This reform also gives the government an excuse to fire many teachers and other faculty employees.  If a student doesn’t like a teacher, he doesn’t have to study under him!  If a teacher has a bit of a bad reputation amongst students and the students decide not to have lessons with said teacher anymore, the teacher gets sacked because he or she has no use anymore.  This is of course one of the reasons teachers are becoming increasingly worried about job security in schools, and further more aggravated because of the new employment criteria that are going to be put in place.  There won’t be anymore national testing for teachers, meaning any old idiot without a diploma can come in and start teaching kids and won’t be tested.  These are teachers that I have immense respect for; they’re people who’ve worked over the years to try and do the best they can and they are slowly being replaced by people who’ve done half the work they have.  It’s no wonder they’re annoyed.

So what’s being done about it?  Several syndicates are crying out in protest against the proposed reforms and generally making as much noise as possible for the government.  Although the reforms were very under the table when they were proposed, teachers have been taking it upon themselves to ‘educate’ their students.  I myself had a long discussion last Saturday with my history teacher about it and was shocked at how little it’s being publicized.  This thursday they plan to strike, but the Draconian tactics being employed by the government controlled school puts pressure on employees who wish to strike by taking away their rights.  Usually, political discussion in school is forbidden under French law, but the teachers are striking back against an increasingly unjust and stereotypically capitalist system, where children’s education is being jepoardized in order to save a few euros.

Although this won’t effect 99% of you who read this blog, imagine if this was happening in your country and to your kids.  You want them to have the best education possible, but this is being put in danger due to the incompetence and greed of the French government.

For those of you who speak French, here’s an article detailing those reforms in full.

Till next time,

James

The Nationalization of Education: The Best Way Forward?

The grand majority of Western civilization lives under a capitalist government, meaning that the means of production are predominantly owned by private corporations operating for profit. The pinnacle of Capitalist society would, of course, be the United States of America, a society so inherently vehement against all forms of social community and corporate responsibility. This is probably the reason that it has carved it’s place as the world’s largest economy.
Closer to home however, privatization of public services gained a huge victory when in 1993 the British Conservative government, led by John Major, passed a legislation allowing the privatization of British Rail. Since then it’s been an uphill climb that has continued with the Labour Government (AKA New Tory), allowing more private corporations to actively contract themselves for various elements of public services.
While we can’t deny that in some cases, privatization has done varying degrees of good, there are various problems that we receive when we accept privatization into public services.

Education

The privatization of national education poses several major problems, the most predominate being:

• The fact that anyone can found a private school, regardless of their previous experience in the field of education. These schools can be founded for many reasons, one such worrying reason being personal profit and capitalization on the necessity to obtain an education in modern society.
• Privatized schools have the ability to abstain from any kind of national watchdog such as Ofsted, meaning that if a private school so choses, they can avoid any type of national scrutiny concerning the management of their budget, the competence of their staff and the general standards of the school. On the upside, most private schools are indeed very good schools where the level of education is considerably higher than their nationalized counterparts.

As a slight bracket, I’ll relate my previous point to a personal experience of mine when I was living in Rome. I attended St. George’s British International School in Rome for five years. My father taught there, as well.
The principal of said school (though not the founder), a Mrs Bridget Gardener OBE was somewhat of an eccentric personality, though the school went to the dogs during her tenure. First of all, the induction rates were amazingly high. In fact the fees are the following:

1. A one-time registration fee of €1,200
2. An additional induction fee that ranges from €9,150 (nursery school) to €17,250 per year per child
3. A lunch fee of €1,030
4. A re-registration fee of €450
5. A book-deposit fee of €400

Teachers at this school were payed around €1500 a month. So where did the rest of this money go? The school was (and still is) heavily in debt, over the course of five years they sold the swimming pool, the nursery complex (taking up more space in the Junior School campus), half of the exercise field and a good part of the school grounds, all to pay debts.
Secondly, Gardener would employ teachers even though they didn’t have the sufficient qualifications required. My German teacher was hired simply because Gardener had a ‘thing’ for him. Luckily for me, he was a great teacher.

• Privatized schools do not have to follow a national education syllabus. This means that they could be teaching children that Jesus Christ made dinosaurs, and it wouldn’t matter. Example: Reg Vardy, former used car salesman, now a founder of several christian schools

So what exactly would be the benefits of a widespread nationalization of all schools?

• Nationalization cuts out the need of ridiculously high school fees: the schools are provided for and financed by the government, meaning that taxpayer’s money is being put to good use securing an education for future generations. Parents would instead be paying the things that are really necessary, such as school lunches and a book deposit. This also means that schools won’t be in financial trouble, as they can rely on the government to provide for them.
• Nationalization also forces every school in the country to undergo regular inspection by an independent government watchdog such as Ofsted in order to determine whether or not a school is performing up to national standards.
• Nationalization obliges schools to follow a national syllabus laid out by the Minister of Education. Having said that, a syllabus is only as good as the Minister of Education who plans it.
• And perhaps the most important reason of all: schools in a national network are not founded for profit. They are there to help your child gain the best possible future and to help them develop a cultural and social education.

While both sides have strong points and weak points (and please be aware, this is a biased article), I do believe that nationalization is the most sensible way forward, and one hell of a kick in the gonads to the capitalist society we now live in.