In the United States, the financing of educational “districts” by the federal government is tied to the pupils’ good performance in reading and mathematics.  A recent study has shown that in the face of this constraint, imposed by the “No Child Left Behind Act”, educational authorities tend to increase teaching time in these areas and to reduce proportionately the time dedicated to other areas of learning, such as history, citizenship education and the arts, which are henceforth relegated to the bottom of the list of priorities. 

Researchers at the Education Policy Center, based in the city of Washington,  have observed that it is the schools in extremely under-privileged urban areas that choose most often to increase teaching time in reading and mathematics, thus removing children in poor areas from a programme of studies previously more open to activities involving general education.  

Restrictive approaches of this nature deprive exactly those pupils who without doubt most need general culture and openness to the world, a fact caused by the socio-economic deprivation which these children experience in their daily lives. 

Schools that demand performance above all else become empty of any concept of citizenship:  an establishment that sacrifices the general education of the pupil on the altar of performance at all cost deprives its clients of historical memory as well as the tools necessary to live in society.  How many of such schools are there in the world?

This American policy of performance knows how to create imitations.   Doesn’t the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) impose its own obligation for results by means of the PISA, a performance test that is the so-called Bible of excellence for State members and which itself causes a national commotion when the pupils of a given country show mediocre results?  And the reactionaries take advantage of this in order to create a totally fabricated, false debate lining up educators against “disciplinarians”, imputing to the former the responsibility for this mediocre performance. 

The uniformisation of educational systems is the order of the day.  The American model is becoming used everywhere, including at the level of higher European education, where the “MA” degree, “masters” doctorate – reveals the disappointing predilection of the European authorities for imitation, as if the difference and the genius of particular national groups and countries should from henceforth be erased by the dictatorship of a single way of thinking.  

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References:
Center for Education Policy. (2006). “From the Capital to the Classroom. Year 4 of the No Child Left Behind Act”.

http://www.cep-dc.org/nclb/Year4/Press/

OECD: Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
http://www.oecd.org/department/0,2688,fr_2649_35845621_1_1_
1_1_1,00.html

Council of Europe.  “Education for Democratic Citizenship 2001 – 2004”
http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/edc/Source/Pdf/Documents/2004
_44_ Tool4TeacherTraining.PDF

 

 

Image : de Cardon (France), tiré de l'album Un demi-siècle de droits de l'homme, p. 52