the 6thmy B from the Pablo-Neruda school in Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis) took their place to receive their first lesson in French and ancient culture. The twenty-three students began by talking about what Latin evokes in them, practised reading words with the correct pronunciation and tried, not without fun, to greet their teacher with a “Hail Master”. The sheet that you have just placed on your desk and whose header announces to you that “talk[ent] already Latin » It leaves them in doubt. But when their teacher presents them with the definitions, they raise their hands and repeat the words: “diary”, “aquarium”, “video”, “sink”… A vocabulary that they know well, whose origin they discover, something they had not suspected.
“The challenge is to engage them in a fun way in this subject that is normally only taught as an option from the age of 5 onwards.my »explains Marie Osmont-Grindel, their teacher. The gamble pays off, according to the “yes” she hears when she closes the session and asks them if they want to continue. This is the first experience for this classics teacher, who has been teaching for six years at this school, one of the most disadvantaged in the country where Latin, until then, did not exist.
This ancient culture course in 6my It was created at the beginning of the school year before the opening, in 2025, of a Latin option starting at age 5.my. A system deployed within the framework of the “attractiveness” plan for Seine-Saint-Denis schools, launched jointly at the beginning of September by the department and the Créteil rectorate, and from which Pablo-Neruda benefits. The ambition: to finance “attractive sections” in disadvantaged universities that some families seek to avoid, in order to improve social and academic diversity.
More than 50% of students receive scholarships
The project is a challenge for Pablo-Neruda. This school of around 650 students is located in the heart of the priority district of Beaudottes, straddling Aulnay-sous-Bois and Sevran, the second most populated QPV in France. The social housing rate is around 70%, almost 40% of the 45,000 inhabitants live below the poverty line and around 30% are foreigners. The adjacent towns of Gros Saule and Beaudottes are also centres of drug trafficking.
An urban segregation that is the focus of the school, classified as reinforced priority education (REP+): between 50% and 60% of its students are on scholarships and its social position index reaches a maximum of 77 (the national average is 100). The concentration of difficulties is all the greater because some of the families whose children drop out of primary schools in the area and who can, prefer to avoid them. Almost 20% of CM2 pupils in the sector are not enrolled at Pablo-Neruda.
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