FRANCE: OLD-FASHIONED TEACHING WINNING CONVERTS

Including the French government but not the French bureaucracy!

The entourage of Jacques Chirac is the latest member of the growing fan club of M Le Bris, 50, a former Trotskyite who is leading a crusade from the little village of Medreac against the teaching methods of modern France. Criticised by his unions and punished by his own ministry for unorthodox methods, the village headmaster has become famous by touching a raw nerve with an angry book, And your Children will not Know how to Read and Count: The Obstinate Bankruptcy of French Schooling. After three decades of progressive methods, France is facing a "veritable disaster", turning out a lost generation of semi-literate, culturally ignorant youngsters, he writes.

His plea for a return to the old rituals of la dictee, rote learning and arithmetic has helped fuel a mood of nostalgia in France, which worries as much as Britain about collapsing standards. One in ten school-leavers cannot read adequately, although 80 per cent now pass the Baccalaureat, the sixth-form leaving examination.

Naturally, the guardians of the educational temple see M Le Bris as a reactionary playing to prejudice....

Francois Fillon, the minister in charge of Europe's most centralised education system, helped to catapult M Le Bris to celebrity by praising his book this summer and inviting him for a chat. Only a month earlier, the Brittany schools authority had denied M Le Bris a promotion because inspectors reported his failure to apply the tightly defined official techniques. "The inspectors consider me a bandit and I am a hero to the minister," M Le Bris joked as he recalled the ministerial audience.

To the annoyance of many teachers, M Fillon has just taken up the Breton teacher's cause, ordering more emphasis on traditional exercises such as dictee and essay writing. "The system has had too much innovation which has been badly digested and ultimately caused disappointment," the minister said.

Standing at the blackboard before his pupils, M Le Bris looks nothing like the stern instituteur -primary school teacher -of pre-modern days.... Warm and enthusiastic, M Le Bris holds his 25 pupils' attention with banter as they compete in a demanding oral arithmetic. They call him Marc, not Monsieur.

By British or American standards, the French system remains rigorous, with attention still placed on grammar, spelling and recitation, but basic skills have declined as emphasis has been laid on encouraging creativity, "global" reading methods and modern maths. M Le Bris, who jokingly blames the "Anglo-Saxons" for starting the rot, said: "If the kids are left to discover the world for themselves, you go back to being primitives."

France has curbed some of the excesses over the past decade, but the ministry and unions remain under the dictatorship of "Stalinist" progressives, he said. Many teachers are rebelling and secretly returning to the old ways. "They often keep secret exercise books that are hidden from the inspectors," he added. "It's schizophrenic. We are doing clandestine grammar". Among the practices adopted by M Le Bris is the 15-times table, a skill which is unthinkable in ordinary primary schools but which his pupils manage without great difficulty, he said.

M Le Bris, the son of primary school teachers, preaches with the ardour of the converted, because he was himself the product of the Seventies educational enlightenment, an extreme left-wing militant with a mission. As a young teacher, he noticed the successes of an old instituteur in a neighbouring school. Little by little I borrowed his approach," he said. "More dictee, more reading out loud. I gradually ejected all the dogma that had indoctrinated me and I got results...."

The above is an excerpt of an article that appeared in "The Times" (London) on Saturday, 18 September, 2004, Page 18





Terror-harboring group recruits students at Duke

University hosts organization that supports violent jihad operations

Speakers at a controversial Duke University Palestinian solidarity conference, which concluded yesterday, recruited students to join a terrorist-harboring organization... The Palestinian Solidarity Movement, which reportedly works closely with the International Solidarity Movement, an organization outlawed in Israel, held its fourth annual conference to "put pressure on the Israeli government, partly by urging universities to sell their stock in companies with military ties to Israel,"

Duke has been justifying its hosting of the conference, in part, by claiming the Palestinian Solidarity Movement is "separate and distinct" from the International Solidarity Movement, which openly supports Hamas, calls for the destruction of Israel, held activities in which several men who later became suicide bombers participated, and has been caught harboring known terrorists in its Mideast office – including members of Islamic Jihad.

But many documented International Solidarity Movement speakers or workshop leaders participated in this week's Duke conference, including ISM's co-founder Huweida Arraf, who tried to recruit students to join her group. Arraf led a workshop yesterday titled "Volunteering in Palestine: Role and Value of International Activists." Arraf handed out brochures for the ISM and urged students to join the terror-supporting group, members of Duke's Conservative Union who attended the workshop told WorldNetDaily. They asked that their names be withheld from publication. Arraf, together with seven other self-declared International Solidarity Movement members who would not state their last names, screened a slide show about ISM activism, detailed the group's two-day training session and fielded questions about the logistics of traveling to "Palestine," explaining how to fool Israeli border control since ISM members are denied entry. Arraf also told students the ISM "happily works with Hamas and Islamic Jihad," said one Conservative Union member who attended the talk. "This workshop, just as its title suggests, functioned as a recruiting session for the ISM, and ISM brochures and materials were distributed there," the Conservative Union member told WorldNetDaily. He pointed out that although Duke officials were present at other PSM conference sessions, no Duke administrator attended the Arraf talk.

The workshop and Arraf's presence constituted a last-minute addition that was not listed on the PSM's original schedule. When confronted with evidence that ISM speakers were invited to the conference and that the Palestinian Solidarity Movement is connected to the ISM, Duke's vice president for public affairs and government relations, John Burness, who previously told WorldNetDaily the two groups weren't connected, stated, "Well, I don't know what [the PSM] is a part of." But Burness later changed his tone, telling WorldNetDaily, "The fact that [a co-founder of the ISM] was here and did speak does not diminish the fact that [the PSM and ISM] are distinct and separate. Does someone who supports or belongs to the American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center mean that they are one and the same?"

Also yesterday, the PSM announced at Duke the results of a Saturday "Resolution Meeting" at which it was decided PSM would again not condemn terrorism. The group had drawn criticism last year after it refused to sign a letter stating it does not agree with terror tactics. "We don't see it as very useful for us as a solidarity movement to condemn violence," Ron Bar-On, who is also an ISM member and organized this year's conference, told The Herald-Sun last month.

Duke University President Richard Brodhead said neither he nor Duke endorses the content of the conference anymore than any other conference or speaker who comes to the university. "You understand that I can't make certain public statements," said Brodhead, adding that he felt doing so could have a chilling effect on the willingness of others at Duke to take positions.

More here. And Phyllis Chesler has written an open letter on the subject to the President of Duke here.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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