Disruptive, again and again. Traveling to Marseille with the Minister of Education, Pap Ndiaye, Emmanuel Macron declared, Thursday, June 2, to want “to generalize” everywhere in the territory “the school of the future”, an educational experiment carried out in Marseille. This approach should enable establishments to finance an innovative project around culture, languages, the environment or science, by giving school principals the opportunity to participate in the recruitment of their teaching staff.
The Head of State had launched the idea of “the school of the future” in September 2021, when he presented the “Marseille en grand” emergency plan, intended to help the second city of France, where the poverty rate exceeds 50% in certain districts. Objective according to the Elysée: to give “more freedom and autonomy for educational teams to build a fairer and more inclusive school system”.
“Red Lines”
At the Menpenti school, visited by the Head of State – one of the 59 establishments in the city of Marseilles selected for this experiment – the mathematics laboratory must provide students with “a genuine activity of research and experimentation” relying on the “digital tools, manipulation and play”according to an internal document that Agence France-Presse was able to consult.
The socialist mayor of the city, Benoît Payan, hailed to the press Emmanuel Macron’s desire to “putting resources on the table like no one has done before”and of “to make children do maths, foreign languages”. “But there are red lines: it is the school of the Republic, the equality of all schools”underlined the mayor, who said to himself “opposite” the recruitment of educational teams by the directors of establishments.
It is also this innovation that the teachers’ unions are contesting, since it would bring about a profound change in the model of national education. “National education is not a sum of start-ups”asserts Stéphane Crochet, secretary general of the SE-UNSA. “This experiment seriously calls into question the national character of public schools, the status of teachers as state officials, the equal treatment of staff in their request for transfer”, adds the FO federation of education (FNEC FP-FO). Others refer to the risk of a “two-speed school”with establishments that are better equipped than others and not necessarily located in underprivileged neighborhoods.
” Roadmap “
“This experiment is a showcase when the president should focus on the hot topics of national education such as salaries, the thawing of the index point or the roadmap of the new minister, who does not s is still not expressed”, believes Guislaine David, general secretary of SNUipp-FSU, the first primary school union. Near the Menpenti school, about thirty demonstrators also asked, as a priority, for more means for education.
Pap Ndiaye, who is making his second field trip after a highly symbolic first visit to the college where Samuel Paty, a professor assassinated in October 2020, worked, is also expected on other subjects. Starting with the teacher recruitment crisis and the reintroduction of mathematics in the common core in high school.