This article appears in “Le Monde de l’Éducation”. If you are a subscriber to Le Monde, you can subscribe to this weekly newsletter by following this link.
In a column published in “Le Monde de l’Éducation”, On September 10, left-wing deputies and senators deplored, not without reason, “The liberal turn of current educational reforms” and declare that“It is more than urgent to return to the historical vision that our republican school embodies”.
But they end with an evocation of Jules Ferry [1832-1893, plusieurs fois ministre de l’instruction publique] which is more dazzling than enlightening: “Although the tendency is to envy foreign educational models – the autonomy of Anglo-Saxon establishments, the “Singapore method”…-, the time has come to reappropriate the words of the founding father of the school of the Republic, Jules Ferry: “My claim is to show you that equality in education is not a utopia; that it is a principle; that it is incontestable in law and that in practice this apparent utopia is in the order of possible things.”
This reference appears well in Jules Ferry’s famous speech at the Salle Molière in 1870. But it is still necessary to place it in its context to understand its meaning and not get lost once again… Jules Ferry begins by saying that the“equality of education” This “in the order of possible things” because “Equality is the very law of human progress! It is more than a theory: it is a social fact.” And he wants as proof that “the last century [le XVIIIe siècle] and the beginning of this [le XIXe siècle] “destroyed property privileges, privileges and class distinctions”.
Departure from the “caste society”
It is essential, if we want to understand without contradictions what the meaning of“equality of education” For Jules Ferry, understanding in what sense he can say that the 18th centurymy century and early 19th centurymy have “annihilated property privileges, privileges and class distinctions”. In fact, it is the annihilation of the “caste society”of the society of the privileges of birth (of “blue blood”) of the Ancien Régime. Neither less nor more. And it is all the more crucial in this case since the same must apply (for him) with respect to equality of education: “The work of our time is certainly not more difficult (…) : to eliminate the last and most formidable inequality that comes from birth: educational inequality. »
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