#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) France, OCL, Courant Alternatif: summer 2022 - Education: from one pope to another! (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The eviction of Jean-Michel Blanquer was experienced as a relief by the teaching

world. The succession entrusted to Pap Ndiaye gives hope for a way out of the
liberal nightmare that has haunted the school for several decades. However, if
the new minister is presented as the antithesis of the previous one, it would be
good for teachers, families and students to take a closer look at the program he
will have to carry out, rather than being seduced by the character. ---- Pap
Ndiaye is undoubtedly a renowned academic, anchored on the left by his political
career, militant of the black cause, sensitive to questions of class and race.
Everything it takes to make him an icon of post-modernity and political
correctness when Blanquer perfectly symbolized the authoritarianism of the
secular and obligatory Republic, a kind of double agent of liberal capitalism and
the most conservative Catholicism, that he served extensively rue de Grenelle [1].

The far right made no mistake about it, attacking the new minister for wokism,
suspecting him of being a supporter of positive discrimination, even an internal
enemy in the process of deconstructing the history and identity of eternal
France. by making "immigration a central element of national history" [2].
Macron has undeniably pulled off a political stunt with this appointment, which
focuses media debate on questions of people, symbols and values, rather than
questioning facts, programs and projects. The gazettes have thus fueled a pseudo
debate between secularism and indigenism, obscuring the real question of the
state of the education system and its future.

Macron's plan...
The policy pursued by Blanquer for 5 years will remain the roadmap of the new
minister: to further increase the process of liberalization and privatization of
the education system [3]with a few key words from the liberal lexicon: "a "freer"
school which will allow establishments to "build their own educational subject
according to their territory" a merit salary for teachers who accept the extra
effort and will be recruited by the head of establishment; professional education
centered on the needs of employment areas and the apprenticeship model,
reintroduced from the 5th grade in college; and of course a paying University
since "We will not be able to stay permanently in a system where higher education
has no price for almost all students" [4]
This program is "the school of the future" experienced in Marseille with 59
primary schools since September 2021, where Macron came to chaperone his new
Minister on June 2
The principle of this "experimentation" is the variation of New Public
Management, ie entrepreneurial management applied to public service. Concretely,
this gives Marseille, in primary education, school directors in charge of
recruiting their teams and setting up a school project, under the control of a
steering committee entrusted to the Prefect and a panel of inspectors. The
counterpart is the payment of a financing budget, but which must correspond to
the already existing partnership and be endorsed by the administration or the
local educational policy [5]. Understand that projects must be carried out with
approved partners, and according to the criteria of the doxa of the moment: the
fundamentals (reading, writing, counting) as objectives, neurosciences as a
scientific basis, and digital technology as a teaching tool. All of this is of
course evaluated to give rise to a ranking of the projects and therefore of the
schools according to criteria to be determined in conjunction with research
organisations.

This experimentation in the Marseille primary school is of course done under the
guise of equal opportunities and meritocracy, for "full employment and the
refusal of inequalities of destiny" ([Elisabeth Borne's speech on the evening of
the first round of the legislative elections.]It only confirms the major trends
that have been at work in the succession of reforms from kindergarten to
university since 2008: strengthening the function of social sorting of education
reduced to an instrument for standardizing knowledge and consciences, serving the
needs of capitalist society and its economy [6]. And most often with the tacit
and shameful consent of the staff, who are not unhappy to see proletarian kids
considered as "uneducable wildlings" excluded from their class...

... The foam of a tidal wave
Yet it is since 2008 that all international surveys show that the French
education system has further increased its reproduction of inequalities. Find the
mistake!
This is the same thing that has been observed in Sweden, which has applied the
business model to its school since the 1990s, and which has been called upon
since 2015 to renationalise its education system by the OECD... itself behind
this liberalisation. It is that in the meantime, if Swedish pupils have been the
big losers of the liberal reforms (Sweden has gone in 20 years from the first
places to the median places of the international surveys on school performance of
the PISA type), the breakage of the system public education has enabled 20% of
students to be educated in a private system that virtually did not exist
previously[7].

By way of comparison, private higher education in France currently educates 21%
of students and generates a turnover of 4.4 billion euros. In France, in 2018,
just over 520,000 students were enrolled in a private higher education
institution. Since 1998, this figure has increased by 77%, while the share of
students enrolled in a public higher education establishment has grown by only
6%. As a result, today, nearly one in five students is enrolled in a private
higher education establishment, whereas they were only one in eight twenty years
earlier. Moreover, the forecast data puts the percentage of students who could be
enrolled in private higher education in ten years at around a third (33%),

There is no doubt that the primary and secondary reforms put in place under
Blanquer and which will be continued by Pap Ndiaye will generalize the process of
this undermining of public schools for the greatest benefits of a market
education sector in full development. .
Whatever his speeches or his intentions, Mr. Ndiaye accepted the roadmap written
by his predecessor. The exit to Marseille was there to mark the guardianship of
the Elysée on the rue de Grenelle. And if he were to forget it, Pap Ndiaye is
surrounded by a cabinet made up of handpicked macronists, an administration run
by Blanquer loyalists since 2008, and technocrats from the Court of Auditors who
do not have ceaselessly denounced the poor performance of the French educational
system and advocated the remedies stemming from the company mentioned above.

The school has nothing else to expect from the new minister other than an
acceleration of the privatization process underway since the turn of the century.
If he has not understood this, Pap Ndiaye will only be a useful idiot of the
macronie, who undoubtedly counts on his "aura" to stifle the anger which smolders
in the rooms of the teachers, and whose mobilizations of January 13 have been a
revelation [8]. Teachers who, inevitably, will want to give a chance to the
newcomer, for very diverse reasons: by co-management strategy of the unions, by
naivety, by blindness or by political adhesion of the educational community to a
project for which it finally voted in number! Despite U.S!...

Philippe, Saint-Nazaire, June 21, 2022

Practices of Blanquerism: Monitoring and Punishing

One of the characteristics of the management of National Education under the last
mandate was the development of an explicit or covert repression. Little reminder
with Laurence de Cock.

If the inventory of repression is difficult to establish because many are silent,
some cases have had a little echo. In 2019-2020, the mobilizations against the
reform of the bac (...) gave rise to a wave of sanctions. Some students did not
take the test following blockages in their high schools. In the summer of 2019,
the movement to retain notes (a repertoire of action very rarely mobilized) took
on an unprecedented scale. In Melle (academy of Poitiers) and in Bordeaux,
teachers suspected of having participated in the blockades of high schools have
been sanctioned. Disciplinary councils, reprimands, automatic transfers,
demotions, etc.

Everything is in place to dissuade teachers from protesting. In Dijon, in
December 2018, in the midst of the movement of the yellow vests, Sophie Carrouge,
a teacher known for her commitment to undocumented students, was summoned by her
superiors for having (...) written on her blog: "Emmanuel Macron is dull ,
Emmanuel Macron is old, Emmanuel Macron is not president. Emmanuel Macron is a
salesman who came to power through the power of funeral urns. He is reminded of
his "duty of reserve". (...)

After months of controlling the public speech of teachers, the vagueness around
their freedom of expression is carefully maintained, in 2019, on the occasion of
the new programming law for schools, known as "confidence", (...) The debates
revolve around teachers' duty to "exemplify" (Article 1). (...) this deviation
from the duty of reserve by the institution is only intended to provoke the
self-censorship of teachers. And we have to be sorry: it's a success. More and
more teachers interviewed in the media refuse to testify under their own name.
Even belonging to a union is no longer reassuring, so blatant is the contempt for
the union world displayed by the Minister. In 2018, did he not file a complaint
against Sud Éducation 93 after this union proposed, in a training course,
single-sex workshops on discrimination at school? A complaint of course dismissed
in 2021. But the damage is done: the intimidation has taken hold.

We can imagine that few teachers dream of a showdown with their ministry. Many
take it in silence, withdraw, and sometimes crack. The suicide of Christine
Renon, school principal in Pantin, is emblematic of this situation. In a
heartbreaking letter, she explains that she can no longer bear the contempt of
the institution and the silence to which it is assigned. Christine Renon, who
signed "An exhausted director", killed herself at the age of 58, in her school,
on September 23, 2019. How many are no longer able to bear the pressure? We know
of at least three others: Frédéric Boulé, Laurent Gatier and Jean Willot. As much
to say it bluntly, the job weighs, and sometimes contempt kills.

The mechanics of monitoring and controlling the teacher world work smoothly.
Intermediate hierarchies do not need direct instructions to intervene in case of
resistance or disobedience. The inspection body exercises a monitoring function.
But the situation is made worse by the general atmosphere of surveillance.

During her winter vacation in 2021, Hélène Careil, a school teacher in Bobigny,
learns of her forced transfer. The file is empty but the argument put forward is
the desire to clean up the atmosphere of the school. Hélène Careil practices
Freinet pedagogy (...). A change of management at the start of the 2019 school
year changed the situation. Exit the Freinet pedagogy, place the application, to
the letter, of the official instructions. (...)

On May 14, 2020, senior officials of the National Education make public, in an
anonymous forum, the control at work at the top of the administration. They are
about fifteen and are called "Grenelle group". The move is historic. Because if
there is a place subject to the duty of reserve, it is the high administration.
The remarks here are without appeal: "These are still civil servants and senior
civil servants purely and simply dispossessed of their expertise files in favor
of technocrats more concerned with their short-term career interests than with
the quality of the service rendered, given , according to their choice, their
inexperience or their incompetence.»

(...) The reform of the senior administration, which allows the minister to place
his trusted persons in key positions and to marginalize others, more independent,
such as the body of general inspectors. The administration of the rue de Grenelle
(where the Ministry of Education is housed) is nothing more than a machine to
obey, matrix of the functioning of the other academic levels. Everything came
under his control, including the content of teacher training. Several recognized
academics have thus made it known that they were on a blacklist. (...)

The authoritarian liberalism, characteristic of Emmanuel Macron's mandate, thus
hits the education system hard, making any resistance more risky. But monitoring
does not only affect the teaching world.

Excerpts from Public school and social emancipation by Laurence de Cock, Agone, 2021
The title is from CA

OCL brochure - 20 pages July 2022 - free price

P.S.
On educational issues see the latest brochure of the OCL The School girl and
servant of capitalism

Ratings
[1] Private school can say thank you to Blanquer, Economic Alternatives , May 12,
2022

[2] Current values May 26, 2022

[3] (cf. Courant Alternatif 301 June 2020, Some elements on the privatization of
National Education

[4] Statement by Macron on January 13, 2022 before the presidents of universities.

[5] " News and some reflections on the Marseille experimentation ", in Trade
union and educational emancipation , n° 10, June 2022 (5)

[6] Capitalism is a global social relationship, and not a simple organization of
the economy, cf CA 292, summer 2019 - Rethinking a critique of the capitalist school

[7] See the dossier " Education a political choice " in POUR (revue de la FSU) n°
240, May 2022 (8)

[8] cf CA 318 March 2022.- Strike of January 13 in National Education: a flash in
the pan ?

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article3259
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca