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The Politics of Reform and Nonreform in French Education

Educational reforms have a mixed record of success in getting beyond the paper on which they have been conceived and designed. For a variety of reasons, educational systems and the political fabric that surrounds, supports, and constrains them tend to be remarkably impervious to major change and seem to have a striking capacity to bounce back into their original shape after each attempt to revamp them. Exceptions, such as the Swedish school reform in the 1960s and the partial success of "going comprehensive" in Britain, would seem to confirm the rule for which developments in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, Belgium, and a good many Third World countries provide ample evidence. There are few places, however, where this resistance to change is more striking than in contemporary France, where, over a period of now almost 30 years, an enormous proliferation of reform proposals has more or less peacefully coexisted with an extremely limited degree of actual change in the educational system. Beginning with the reforms proposed by Berthoin in 1959 (for which the groundwork had been laid in the immediate postwar years), a series of more or less fundamental proposals for reforming some part or other of the French educational system has ranged clear across the history of the Fifth Republic: Fouchet in 1963, Fontanet in 1973, Haby in 1975, Savary in 1981, Chevenement in 1984, and (memories of a stormy November on the streets of Paris!) Monory and Devaquet in 1986-they all, with varying degrees of rigor mortis, have joined what a commentator in Le Monde has called "the cemetery of reform projects, dead even before they were handed down to posterity with the name of their author attached."9