FrenchPrincipalSaysWakeUp

Et vos enfants ne sauront pas lire . . . ni compter!
Editions Stock
Avril 2004
Marc Le Bris

« Pendant vingt ans, l'Éducation nationale m'a empêché de faire mon métier. À ma sortie de l'école normale, en 1977, j'étais un jeune instituteur progressiste et militant, convaincu de la supériorité de la méthode de lecture dite "naturelle".

J'ai tout cru. J'ai tout fait, des groupes, des activités d'éveil, de la grammaire fonctionnelle, de la lecture naturelle, des mathématiques modernes, de l'animation, de l'auto-apprentissage, de l'histoire des objets, du décloisonnement, de la créativité, des études dirigées . . .

Pourtant, les élèves des maîtres plus anciens, qui osaient continuer à faire des dictées ou à apprendre la lecture par syllabage systématique, obtenaient de meilleurs résultats. Les miens, dorlotés par les méthodes modernes, ont subi un handicap scolaire dont j'ai honte aujourd'hui. Honte? Pas tant que ça... Car, comme bon nombre d'entre nous, j'ai corrigé le tir.

J'écris ce livre pour alarmer les parents, pour qu'ils sauvent leurs enfants, pour qu'ils fassent le travail de l'école à la maison. La pédagogie moderne ne sert plus qu'à justifier l'abandon des ambitions que nous avions pour nos enfants. Nous avons devant nous une véritable catastrophe culturelle. »

Marc le Bris, 50 ans, est instituteur et directeur d'école à Médréac, en Ille-et-Vilaine. Il est membre de l'association Sauver les lettres.

For twenty years the national education system prevented me from doing my job. When I graduated from education school, in 1977, I was a young instructor, progressive and activist, convinced of the superiority of the method of teaching reading known as ‘natural.’

I believed everything. I did everything, I did groups, I did [icebreaking] activities, functional grammar, natural reading [probably whole language], the new math, student participation [l’animation = interaction], self-teaching [self-directed teaching, probably], ‘history of objects’ [l’histoire des objets], taking down the walls, creativity, directed studies . . .

However, the students of the oldest teachers, who dared to continue to do dictée^* or teach reading with phonics, obtained the best results. My students, guilded by modern methods, had endured an academic handicap of which I am ashamed today. Shame? Maybe not completely . . . because, like many of us, I compensated for some of the worst excesses.

I wrote this book in order to wake parents up, so they can save their children and teach their children their school work at home. All modern pedagogy does is justify the abandonment of the ambitions we have had for out children. We have ahead of us a veritable cultural catastrophe.

Marc le Bris, 50 years old, is a teacher and principal of d'école à Médréac, en Ille-et-Vilaine. He is a member of Sauver les letters.




^*Le dictée is the classic exercise in which the teacher dictates a passage of prose and the students write it down. This was traditionally an important part of French language arts, because so many French words sound alike. My husband did it when he was first learning French, and said it was incredibly hard. All the adjectives have to agree in gender & number with the nouns, and you can’t hear any of this in the spoken language.

French is still being taught using le dictee in other countries. Recently there was an international dictee contest judged by Bernard Pivot, the famous moderator of the book review show Apostrophes.



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