A ready and easy way to handicap young minds: The new and "Improved" curriculum for French elementary schools, or how to prevent students from acquiring basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic The French Ministry for Education, with much media support, has boasted time and again that French elementary schoools are excellent, all the while delivering scathing criticism of middle schools. Secondary schools, however, must have foundations to build on; and the different disciplines taught in secondary school curricula take for granted the solid acquisition of basic language and mathematics skills. Although current middle-school curricula actually make satisfactory scholastic achievement even more difficult, the real source of a number of the problems children are facing lie in the elementary schools. Which is why Mr. Ferrier, a high-ranking Inspector of French schools had, in a 1998 study entitled "Improving the Performance of Elementary Schools ," already pointed out that "From 21-42% of eight-year-olds (depending on the year) appear unable to master basic skills either in language or mathematics or both. The numbers are between 21 and 35% as they enter middle school. Schools cannot turn a blind eye to the serious problem that this study brings to light : approximately a quarter of all children entering French middle schools are experiencing significant or even serious difficulties". Acquiring "basic skills in reading and arithmetic" implies rote learning -- exercises requiring repetition and imitation that develop a child's memory. Such rote-learning activities take time and are best performed at an early age, when children often like to learn the same facts and skills that adults know. But certain measures adopted by educators and school systems prevent the acquisition of basic knowledge and elementary skills and at the same time make these much harder if not impossible to acquire at the higher levels of middle school, to say nothing of high school. Among these measures: - The abandonment of all forms of memorization or rote-learning in favor of more "creative " and "rewarding " or "fulfilling" excercises. - The drastic reduction of the overall time allotted to the learning of basic knowledge and skills. Over the last 30 years, for example, French first-graders have lost six hours a week of language-skills instruction -- 15 hours a week in 1967 against a mere 9 hours today. Within the elementary school cycle as a whole, such reductions mean, in practical terms, the loss of an entire year of schooling in that subject area. -The constant "streamlining" of school curricula, which invariably means moving away from strong emphasis on content-based education and basic skills. The learning difficulties that students encounter at higher levels are often the direct result of the fact that they have never been required to exercise their memories; instead, they are often instructed in "methodology" or encouraged to be "creative". And it is understandable that later on, at an age where youngsters often yearn for greater individual autonomy, they should no longer want to devote long hours to memorizing the basic rules of mathematics and grammar, however essential they may be. This is why the official views on education are cheating the public : students are expected to think and work autonomously, yet they have never been given the intellectual wherewithal -- the basic knowledge and training -- that would enable them to achieve that autonomy. Propositions for new curricula for French elementary schools were unveiled in 1999. These propositions called for a reduction in class time devoted to the learning of basic mathematics operations, including, for example, basic division problems ("What is 43 divided by 3?"). No justification was provided for the decision to eliminate such division exercises, even though the proposed changes were made after what was termed a positive reaction from educators "consulted" by the Ministry. These propositions have since been replaced by a new reform project which will also be submitted to French educators for their comments. We have examined this reform project, as it has emerged from the proposals of the Joutard Commission. We would like to make the following observations on this revamped project : IN FRENCH Less time devoted to French. The weekly course time for eight-year-olds has been slashed to 6 hours -- representing a loss of one-third of the class time spent on this subject. "Grammarless" French instruction. The weekly scheduled proposed in the new project draws a distinction betweeen "training in linguistic competence", which is allotted no specific or minimum number of classroom hours, and "grammar". This distinction, in other words, implies that studying grammatical rules has no direct connection to achieving "competence" in language skills. Drastic reductions in curriculum content. When official curriculum guidelines for 1995 are compared to those in place ten years earlier, in 1985, it is obvious that a significant number of the fundamentals of logic, conceptualization, grammar and expression have already disappeared from instruction in French; in 2002, further cuts will be made in the list of fundamentals. What will be left? How will students be able to "tell a story" and thus to "exercise their creativity," for example, if they cannot differentiate among the different forms of the past tense? Teaching methods. Methods relying on memorization or rote-learning, which are essential if students are to acquire the "reflexes" that any solid education depends on, have been banned from primary schooling. Students are no longer required to learn by heart their irregular verbs or the different rules of grammar or spellling. IN MATHEMATICS Since 1995, students finishing their elementary school instruction no longer know how to multiply decimals and still less how to divide them. Why? Because "calculating the product or the quotient of two decimals is not among the aims of this learning cycle". Required skills are limited to operations involving "small numbers". Teaching of volume units is restricted to wholes. Nor is there any place for learning to calculate in square kilometers. And yet, these are fundamentals that will be required by the beginning sessions of geography class. How can students be expected to "discover the complexity of relations between population density on the one hand and wealth and poverty on the other" ? Apparently, they are supposed to "discover" the complexity of mathematical operations that they are unable to perform and to calculate in units of measure that they have never encountered before. Prefiguring the philosophy of the Joutard Commission, some regional school inspectors already recommend that teachers simply "discuss" population density -- but of course without going to all the "bother" of calculating it! The new propositions for curriculum reform in mathematics simply make a bad situation even worse. NO MORE "DUMBING DOWN" The signatories of this petition call for -- the abandonment of this new "reform" which, if put into effect, will produce yet another increase in the number of students who do not know how to read and write and who will be unable to peform at even minimal achievement levels in the higher disciplines. -- organized resistance against such destructive reforms that pretend to make scholastic achievement easier by abandoning instruction in the fundamentals, whereas it is exactly the reverse that is true! -- a strong critique of the dogma that would have us believe that "conceptualization" or "skills" may be taught in abstracto -- that is, independently of necessary facts, background knowledge, demonstrations or basic operations of rational thought? How can students "understand" the mathematical concept of "division" without actually dividing numbers? How can they speak intelligently of population density if they are unable to calculate it on their own? How can they tell a story if they cannot differentiate among the different verb tenses? "Communication," "discussion," and "creative self-expression" are all well and good. But how can we ensure that our students do not just "talk" but know what they are talking about? Certainly not by accepting the abandonment of standards and content in education.