While criticism is multiplying against the reform of the school, the Minister of National Education launches a consultation committee on the teaching of maths and welcomes its results.
They have two months left to choose their future. Second high school students have until early May to choose their specialty courses. And especially to decide: keep or not the maths which are no longer taught outside the common core. The mathematician Jean-Pierre Bourguignon tackled: “We had arrived at the percentage of girls in terminal S being almost equivalent to that of boys. With the reform, this rate plummeted to 10%. In two years, we lost twenty years of effort.
Valérie Pécresse engaged, denouncing “a perverse effect” of the Blanquer reform: “We removed a lot of mathematics” from the high school curriculum and “we risk having much less of a breeding ground for girls in science” in the years to come . The minister replies and pulls out of his pocket a card on which he has noted the real data. He rejects “these figures that came out of nowhere”, and percentages invented by “the middle of mathematicians who did not digest that (he) removes math from the common core”.
“We are not going to relaunch a war between disciplines”
For the current school year, 64.1% of first year pupils have chosen this subject, including 48.1% of girls. In terminale where you still have to give up a specialty, the latter drop out: of the 37.5% of young people who keep maths, there are only 38.8% of girls. And for the optional “expert maths” option, they only make up a third of the workforce. The Minister of National Education has launched a consultation committee on the teaching of this subject in high school. And conceded that it would “probably” add math in the common core in first and final, he had not until now explained how. “We are not going to relaunch a war between the disciplines, he warns before Paris Match. If we add hours, we will have to take them elsewhere.” The discussions are open – “it has been said that I was vertical and authoritarian, I don’t think I am” – but the first avenue would be to revisit the existing two hours of weekly scientific teaching by injecting math into it. “It’s taboo to say that but if we give three hours for everyone until the end of the year, we will satisfy Mr. Bourguignon but certainly not the students. For many of them, it’s a release not to do it anymore, ”he recalls. That young people hesitate, he sees a good sign there: “We have re-enchanted the programs and invented new subjects. It’s as if we had opened the buffet!”
“The day we do the accounts, I will not have to blush”
Two months from the end of his mission, Jean-Michel Blanquer is pleased with his record at the head of his ministry – one is never better served than by oneself: “I took courageous options. The day we do the accounts, I won’t have to be ashamed. And there is surely a correlation between the fact of having succeeded in something and being attacked so much. To the one who will occupy his chair at the next return to school, he advises: “Leave the school alone. There are other things that we have not transformed!”
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