It’s a return to unfinished business. Emmanuel Macron announced, Thursday, June 2 during a school visit to Marseille, that mathematics would again be integrated into the common core of first class lessons, from the start of the next school year, but ” optional “. “There will always be the maths specialty, but there will be the possibility offered to all students to choose, outside the specialty, the hour and a half of mathematics that had been taken out of the common core”, he added, specifying: “It will not be mandatory. »
The sensitive subject of maths animated the presidential campaign. They left the common core of teaching in 2019 by becoming a specialty education – like a dozen other disciplines – left to the free choice of high school students. Previously, even students in the literary stream benefited from mathematical education. An expert report recommended in March to reintroduce mathematics in the common core from the first class, at the rate of an hour and a half to two hours more per week. The proposal was also included in the program of Emmanuel Macron, candidate for his re-election.
“Let the children be free”
The Head of State stressed that this teaching ” will not be[it] not compulsory from this first year »in order to “do it fast”. “I think we also have to get out of this dilemma, before it becomes mandatory. Let’s give freedom to children and families”, he continued. At the beginning of May, when the Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer had mentioned this reintegration of mathematics into the common core, there was no question of confining them to the status of “option”. Several teacher representatives were concerned about the ability of schools to adapt quickly, both in terms of organization and schedules, and recruitment of the necessary professionals when the discipline is not attractive.
“With this choice of reintroducing maths “as an option”, the government is taking a third path so as not to completely apply it from the start of the school year, and not to postpone it to 2023 either”, said to Agence France-presse Sophie Vénétitay, general secretary of SNES-FSU, the first secondary school union. According to her, “This is a political posting”which does not “unfortunately not getting more students or more girls to choose maths, when that was the goal”.
In a press release, a collective of learned societies and associations of professors and scientific academics asks the Minister of Education Pap Ndiaye “the establishment of a working group bringing together the various competent actors to propose sustainable solutions for the start of the 2023 school year”.