A Cure for a "Plague"

A dictee, as every French schoolchild learns to his sorrow, is a dictation exercise full of traps for the unwary. Prosper Merimee, author of the original Carmen, once offered a 248-word specimen as a test at the imperial court in Compiegne, and Napoleon III committed 75 errors. (Empress Eugenie made only 62.) Nothing much has changed since then in the stern regulations governing how the French teach their language to their children. Grading is fierce (more than five mistakes on a dictee bring a zero), and two out of three students flunk at least one year of elementary school.

Finally, a half-century after the last major revision of the rules, the Ministry of National Education has announced a broad program of reform to start next fall. The old dictees will give way to exercises designed to help a student's development. No longer will pupils be compelled to memorize long lists of irregular verbs, or to suffer punitive homework consisting of copying conjugations a hundred times over. Indeed the ministry described the traditional teaching of grammar as a "plague." Instead, children will be encouraged to talk and act freely in class. Even the scratchy pens with which French children learned to write an elegant hand are to be discarded in favor of ballpoints and felt tips.

The heart of the report, says Education Minister Joseph Fontanet, is the establishment of "a new balance between theory and practice (with the accent on practice), between children's spontaneity and formal pedagogy. In the past, we have been overly suspicious of their spontaneity." Now Fontanet says he hopes to build a new balance between purely intellectual study and the development of children's sensitivity --"we have to create libraries in every classroom and to make poetry a fundamental part of primary school learning." Perhaps, he suggests cautiously, the children who have been drilled in the verse of Lamartine and de Vigny might enjoy "modern" poets like Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918).

"High time," the weekly newsmagazine Le Point said of the reforms, "because everyone recognized the bankruptcy of the teaching of French in primary schools." One leading pedagogue at the Ministry of Education, Jean Repusseau, praised the changes as evidence "that we have taken a long stride forward." In comparison with the informality of most U.S. elementary schools, however, it might be said that France is only belatedly catching up.

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