FR 311R L'écucation

10. L'éducation
I talked with my new friend, Adèlie, about the school system in France. Adèlie is in her first year of université studying phycology at the Université de Poitiers. It was quite the conversation, and involved a nice mix of mostly French, some English, and full charts and diagrams for me to understand. Their system is a lot different than ours. In France, the organization de la scolarité is organized as follows:

Level                            Age
École maternelle           2-6 (optional)
École élémentaire        
     CP                           6-7
     CE1                         7-8
     CE2                         8-9
     CM1                        9-10
     CM2                       10-11
Collège                        11-15 (Can you imagine 4 years of middle school?! Eww.)
Lycée    
     Seconde                  15-16
     Première                 16-17
     Terminale               17-18

Adèlie explained that in your first year of lycée, 2nde, you take lots of classes in lots of subjects. Sort of like General Education classes. Then in 1ère, your seconde year, you choose one of three tracks: L (littéraire), S (scientifique), or ES (sciences économique et sociales). Also, in 1ère, you take your BAC de français. The BAC, or Baccalauréat, is sort of the French equivalent to the ACT/SAT in the US, but it's state mandated. In terminale, you take the BAC for whatever track you've chosen, and MUST pass with at least a 10/20. Here's the scoring: 12= Assez Bien. 14= Bien. 16= Très Bien. 18= Félicitations du jury. Adèlie scored a 13,8 without studying. She said 3 people from her class of 34 failed.

I heard a little rumor that France is working on changing all of that ^ to make their system more like ours. Interesting.

I also drilled Adèlie on the process of getting into university. She said that if you don't plan on attending a specialized university, your BAC score doesn't matter. You can choose to go to any of the general universities in France. However, if you want to go to a university that specializes in something, medicine for instance, than you need to worry about doing well on the BAC. Adèlie wanted to study phycology, so her passing BAC score would get her into any university that was relevant to her, like Université de Poitiers.

FR311 1. La religion et l'éducation

As my guide walked me to my Wednesday/Friday school, Jules Ferry, we passed several other schools. Most were private Catholic schools. I asked her what she thought about laïcité, the separation in the State of civil society and religious society. She expressed the very strong opinion that schools should not teach religion. If the parents want to teach it at home, that's their business, but like most French, she didn't sound like much of a fan of any kind of religion at all. She said she was much more a supporter of public schools than private ones, since private schools in France tend to be religious.