French teachers strike over change plans

France's mammoth is stirring.

Once every four or five years, the beast stamps its foot and lets out a bellow. Governments tend to notice.

The mammoth - le mammouth - is an unflattering nickname for the French education system. Size and inertia are its hallmarks.

On Tuesday, many of le mammouth's million teachers will once again be on the street, chanting - if not quite bellowing - against the latest attempt to change the way they work.

School change plans come round regularly in France.

They tend to answer to the same perceived imperative: how to restore the "republican" school system to a lost golden age and stop the inexorable decline in international rankings.

This time, Socialist President Francois Hollande and Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem have targeted the "college" - the middle-school for 11 to 15-year-olds that comes between "ecole" (primary school) and "lycee".

But with awful predictability, their designs have again provoked a chorus of outrage - and not just from the teaching unions.

Traditionalists are up in arms about the disappearance of Latin and Greek. Berlin is concerned about the downgrading of German.

Left-wingers say plans to give more autonomy to school principals will create education a la carte and a multi-tier system where the nicer neighbourhoods have the nicer schools.

Right-wingers say Islam is being promoted over Christianity.

Underlying much of the criticism is a more general complaint that the basics of education are being replaced by a gobbledygook of "modules" and "interdisciplinary functions" that confuse children far more than they enlighten.

Separately, a controversial reform of the history programme is also due in 2016.

This has drawn fulminations from many - especially on the right - who say it encourages shame rather than pride in France's past.

The unions who have called for the strikes on Tuesday make clear that their opposition to the changes is quite distinct from the critiques of the political right.

Teachers of Latin dispute the government's argument that the classics are elitist.

Today about 20% of French college students study Latin, though most drop it after two years.

"The way things are looking, Latin is just going to disappear from the curriculum," Cathy Rezler, a teacher of French and Latin, near Marseille, told Liberation newspaper.

"But these are our roots. And the children like it!"

The ending of the intensive language option is strongly resented by teachers of German, who believe it will accelerate the long-standing decline of the language in French schools.

As with Latin, the government is removing what it sees as the preserve of a privileged minority.

Only 16% of students take the intensive language option, and in left-wing eyes it creates discrimination within schools.

But teachers of Latin and German fear the changes will encourage middle-class families to send children into the semi-private Catholic system - thus entrenching rather than fighting class separation.

With the profession voting overwhelmingly on the left, many teachers are reluctant opponents of the Socialist changes.

But they say the requirement, for example, to devise course-work across different subjects is badly thought out and imposes hours of extra labour.

And for the more doctrinaire, new powers giving head teachers control over parts of the curriculum breach the republican goal of equality, because schools in richer catchment areas will inevitably end up offering wider options.

But if the anger over the language changes is real enough, it is as nothing to the passions set off by the new college history programme.

In an increasingly bitter series of exchanges, Ms Vallaud-Belkacem recently described opponents of the programme as "pseudo-intellectuals" after they said it would deprive children of vast chunks of France's cultural heritage.

Among the most outspoken critics is philosopher and former centre-right Education Minister Luc Ferry, who described the changes as "scandalous, empty-headed, noxious and partisan".

Citing the chapter on Europe from the 17th to the 19th Centuries, he said Europe "is presented solely from the perspective of colonialism and the slave trade" while the section on ideas of the Enlightenment was optional.

"It means that Voltaire is optional! That the scientific revolution is optional! Of course we must teach the slave trade, just as we must speak of the Holocaust.

"But you cannot just see European civilisation from that point of view."

Others have complained that in the history course for 14-year-olds, a section on Islam and its expansion is compulsory while the Church in the Middle Ages is just an option.

At the heart of the argument, lie competing views of what France's vaunted but failing model of education should be about.

That it is indeed failing is the one point on which both sides agree.

Ranking of the performance of 15-year-olds in 65 countries

The number of children leaving college unable to master basic French and maths rises every year.

"Progressives" view equality as a noble and realisable ideal.

They believe the curriculum needs to be changed to reflect today's realities and to end an in-built discrimination against children for whom Latin and medieval Christianity (for example) have no automatic resonance.

But opposing these government voices are those who say that education in France is steadily being gutted of any genuine content.

For the critics, what Mr Hollande and Ms Vallaud-Belkacem are doing - far from being revolutionary - is a mere continuation of school changes (from left and right) that go back decades.

And these, say the critics, have all tended to undermine the central purpose of education - which is the transmission of knowledge through the generations.

As for the unions in le mammouth, they are somewhere else entirely.

Instinctively most of them side with the "progressives" in government.

But by instinct they also resist all changes to their natural habitat.

That is when they start to bellow.