from 'Le Monde de l’éducation', December 2005

by Luc Cédelle (translated by Michele Ledda)

Claiming 400 members, the association Sauver Les Lettres is not an impressive entity. Yet it manages to punch well above its weight in the education debate. Its high-flying contacts, its capacity to attract the media and its fierce militancy make all the difference.

Sauver Les Lettres is an association of teachers formed in 2000 ‘against the Allegre reform’. It has since ‘fought the policies of Lang, Ferry and Fillon, which are a continuation of the former,’ one can read on the homepage of their website. Having as their aim to fight against ‘the collapse’ of French teaching, it has for a long time seemed like an association among others, though firmly situated in the camp hostile to modern pedagogic trends. Today, one has the clear impression that they are ‘the only game in town,’ or at least in the media village. The least one can say is that they have achieved an unquestionable visibility and efficiency. These are partly due to its almost military capacity to insert itself in every vacant space and to employ the whole range of expression, even the most ... how do you say too much in Latin?

Supermaxime, answers the expert. That’s it: the members of this collective, at any rate those who publish books, are often supermaxime. Jean-Paul Brighelli, teacher of French, is the author of La Fabrique du crétin (Dumb Factory). This work, which in October figured in the second place for sales in France in the essays category, includes statements that can appeal to a certain kind of audience while striking fear into another. Like this one: ‘Then, let’s quickly clarify a simple question which some want to turn into a problem: the pupil is not in the classroom to ‘express himself’, he is there to listen, learn and take notes.’ Other passages, however, exalt the ‘seduction of difficulty’, a notion that the ‘pedagogues’ are very happy with: ‘children love challenges (including intellectual ones) and they have no desire to be treated like idiots.’

Even in the most polemical books one can find more nuanced statements, but there is always a polemical side to them and some of the authors raise it to levels that are very unusual in the education debate.

Marc Le Bris, primary head teacher of a school in Ille-et-Vilaine, is today one of the stars of the association. In his book, Et vos enfants ne sauront pas lire... ni compter (Your Children Will Not Be Able to Read ... Nor Count], which was in September 2004 the first big publishing success of this movement, he takes issue in particular with the reading methods. But in his last chapter he widens his aim. ‘Could anyone anticipate, he asks, that one day there would be corpses thrown into the Mekong river? Could anyone foresee the death camps?’ And he continues: ‘History, to be sure, never repeats itself. And I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I can only see that today our society undergoes that denigration of culture that has preceded sinister periods.’ And when he calls into question the ‘school project’ imposed on schools by the 1989 Jospin law that he criticises, he does it in these terms: ‘Infamy, intellectual manipulation worthy of the Inquisition.’ Later on, this statement: ‘Certificates and rewards given today to some schools that present a ‘good project’, to the detriment of those schools that don’t, are the brown shirt or the Little Red Book of the modernisers among teachers.

Marc Le Bris writes in a personal capacity. Yet his propositions don’t make him an exception, let alone a dissident in Sauver Les Lettres, where no one seems to have expressed any reservations to the publication of such charged phrase as ‘brown shirts.’ In the same vein, Bernard Lecherbonnier, a writer close to the association, though not a member, professor at Paris 13, has written Pourquoi veulent-ils tuer le français ? (Why Do They Want to Kill the Teaching of French?), published in spring 2005. There he portrays the ‘libertarians’ and the administrators of the Education Nationale as the ‘imitators of Pol Pot’ who allegedly have ‘taken literature out of French teaching’. No one can interpret this statement the wrong way, as the book includes more in the same vein, and in particular it closes with these two sentences: ‘Petainism is neither left nor right wing. Luckily, nor is the resistance.’ Bernard Lecherbonnier, who quotes other authors form Sauver Les Lettres, has written the foreword to La Fabrique du Cretin. Every one of these authors has its own personality, his characteristic style, but they don’t evolve in separate compartments.

Even quoting the propositions above is embarrassing, above all, in relation to the important debate within which they are expressed. It would be too easy, exploiting their extraordinary character, to dismiss out of hand all questions raised about the teaching of French. Yet to omit them would be even worse: these are not informal statements but extracts taken from documents that have been carefully considered, read again many times, and finally published. These are statements that have earned their authors numerous invitations to televised talk-shows. And this is one of the unquestionable successes of Sauver Les Lettres: high profile media recognition, which means access to public opinion. From this standpoint, there is a complementary function between these pamphlets and the activity of the association which is their bedrock.

Starting from this observation, we should refine our understanding. It is even an obligation on our part, or we will not understand at all what makes the growing success of Sauver Les Lettres’ theses. First point: even if polemics is the favourite genre of Sauver Les Lettres, all these books – one can count them by now by the dozen, only a few being commercial successes – don’t have just statements like the ones cited above. There are also pamphlets which are, let’s say, normal: fierce, accusatory, extreme, but such is the style of the genre. As for the press releases and official statements of the association, they are firm but, in every sense of the word, polite [/polished].

Second point: just as much as their texts are scary, these authors, if you meet them, are charming! Obviously, it is easier (even a necessary condition) to appreciate their human qualities if you are not one of the targets of their criticism. Worse than charming, they are seducers – bright, passionate, erudite and in love with their discipline. Le Monde de l’Education has published in 2004 a portrait of one of their founders, Robert Wainer: a typical, generous teacher with high expectations of his pupils...

Never mind that other teachers are just as good without necessarily sharing the ideas of Sauver Les Lettres, even opposing them, the members of this association don’t see themselves as on the attack but on the defensive. They are convinced of having ‘their backs to the wall’ in order to ‘save’ not only their discipline but all school subjects, and through them, knowledge and culture. ‘Our characteristic is reflection,’ says Michel Buttet, other founding member and, on its own, craftsman of the very dense website of the association.

The ideas its members share – a radical critique of modern pedagogy, which has substituted teaching methods for content – originate in 1984 with the book by the philosopher Jean-Claude Milner, De l'école (On Education), first resounding condemnation from a left wing perspective of the education reforms. Today the association, which has a number of old militants of the extreme left in its ranks, reclaims the ‘ideal of an elitist school for all’, ‘a school that can only be ‘against economic liberalism.’ But if this current has existed for a long time, it is the protests against Claude Allegre which have firmly established it among the teaching profession. The association was born precisely in March 2000, opposing the project of reform of the French Baccalaureate syllabus. Elaborated under the supervision of the Conseil national des programmes (CNP) by a group of experts coordinated by Alain Viala, professor at the new Sorbonne and at Oxford (see Le Monde de l'éducation November 2005), these new programmes have been and still are the object of an implacable campaign. This campaign started on 4 March 2000 with the publication in Le Monde of a pamphlet entitled: ‘ C'est la littérature qu'on assassine Rue de Grenelle ‘ (it’s literature they are murdering in Rue de Grenelle, the Education Ministry). Among the tens of signatures, some heavyweights of French teaching in the universities: Michel Zink, Antoine Compagnon, Michel Delon, Michel Jarrety... This text also counts other prestigious supporters: Yves Bonnefoy, Régis Debray, François Nourrissier, Laurent Schwartz... and even the comedian Laurent Terzieff! The association, which hadn’t issued this petition, is formed soon after.

One of its great strengths will be to create a link between secondary teachers and leading French literature academics, the member of l’Académie Française Marc Fumaroli in particular, who was then president of the Association pour la Sauvegarde des Enseignements Littéraires (SEL), founded by Jacqueline de Romilly. The defence of Latin and Greek has thus joined forces with the protests against the reform of the French curriculum, which has joined forces with the refusal of modern pedagogies, the whole kept together by the common cement of the opposition to ‘dumbing down’. In this regard, the association doesn’t recognise the validity of sociological enquiries showing that ‘standards are rising,’ in other words that more and more pupils are learning more and more in various subjects. What its members see most of all, (and they are not the only ones to see this), is that numerous pupils arrive to secondary school incapable of following the lesson, and that high grades at the Baccalaureate and University degree are not incompatible any more with an insufficient command of the French language. That’s what everyone of its statistics confirms. The association is sufficiently partisan to select only the statistics which prove their point: the most dramatic.

Quantitatively, with its 400 members, it is not an impressive organisation. But its contacts in high places, its ability to attract the media and its fierce militancy make the difference. A difference of which, the modernisers’ camp has not quite been able to take the measure. For it is not enough to take offence at its blunders or to dismiss it as ‘reactionary’ to pretend of having settled the matter. Especially, as it often happens, when people reply with texts full of spelling mistakes ... All the more so as it is an organisation, or rather an organism that is capable of evolving. Someone notes that the association is essentially made of secondary school teachers? Marc Le Bris (primary head) and Rachel Boutonnet, very young primary school teacher, become leading figures: and it is not a setting up, but a step in that direction. The organisation is criticised for being a ‘club’ of literature teachers? It takes the battle to the terrain of the curriculum as a whole. They started with the primary school curriculum in October 2001 with a petition signed by the biggest names in Maths, among which Alain Connes.

And the main initiator of this petition, Michel Delord, simple teacher of maths (but elected and re-elected to the board of the Société Mathématique de France) creates in 2003 a sister structure, the Groupe de réflexion interdisciplinaire sur les programmes (GRIP, Group of interdisciplinary reflection on the curriculum), which becomes quite quickly an important piece of the mechanism. This association, chaired by Jean-Pierre Demailly, renowned mathematician and academic, counts in its ranks Marc Le Bris but also Denis Kambouchner, philosopher of education, author, within this movement of the only firm but respectful critique of Philippe Meirieu (4). An anecdote will give an idea of the reserves of fighting spirit in possession of these groups: Roland Goigoux, director of a research lab on teaching at the IUFM [teacher training school] of Auvergne, is a recognised expert in the teaching of reading who has taken up the gauntlet of the polemic with Sauver les Lettres. In a text published in December 2003, in a footnote, he refers briefly to the Official Instructions [to schools] of 1923. Making a mistake, according to Michel Delord, who immediately provides a reply in which he shows extracts from such instructions and the article of the pedagogic dictionary by Ferdinand Buisson (1887) dealing with reading methods. You need to look closely in order to follow but the principle is clear: never concede an inch to your opponent ... As for the ‘Viala curriculum’, Sauver les Lettres are still hoping to obtain its revision, which [former minister for education] Francois Fillon had promised them.

Still more evolution. This anti-everything organisation is criticised for the absence of concrete propositions? Their GRIP is working hard to develop an alternative curriculum and it’s negotiating with the minister to obtain an authorisation to experiment it in the classroom. Someone notes that this movement, typically French, is not interested in international comparisons? Sauver les Lettres and GRIP become passionate about anyone who, anywhere in the world, defends ‘explicit teaching’ and opposes the usual theses of the ‘pedagogues’ who want the pupil at the centre of learning. In Québec, Canada, traditional stronghold of ‘pedagogism’, this opposing current scores points. On 5 November, both associations organise a conference at the Sorbonne with the title: ‘What teaching methods are effective?’ star speaker being Clermont Gauthier, Québéc academic, author of a book entitled Échec scolaire et réforme éducative (School Failure and Education Reform). Only about sixty people are present, but we can rest assured: we haven’t heard the last of ‘explicit teaching.’