Abstract
The French baccalauréat serves as the secondary education certificate for approximately 80 percent of the French population. When French students finally take the exam for which their entire literary education has prepared them, what actually happens? Using the most recent session of the “bac” as an illustration, this chapter conveys the complex and ritualistic nature of the process, its continued power over educational policy, and arguments both for and against its reform. The “bac” is not a model for literary pedagogy more broadly, but rather an example of the difficulty of breaking away from a conformist, “canonical exercise” with roots in Jesuit education.
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Notes
- 1.
The American Association of Colleges and Universities in 2007 published a useful history of the “outcomes assessment” movement, A Brief History of Student Learning Assessment: How We Got Where We Are and a Proposal for Where to Go Next. It reveals that standardized testing began around 1900, long before the start of the current debate on the economic value of education. This first phase of general education quantification culminated, between 1928 and 1932, in a massive experimental assessment of thousands of Pennsylvania high school and university students in literature, history, English, science, math, and intelligence (I.Q.), financed by the Carnegie Foundation (Shavelson 6).
- 2.
See Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for the United States (233–7), in which the OECD recognizes the Common Core as a strategy for improving the performance of American students on the PISA exam that it designs and administers.
- 3.
There is some standardized testing in France administered at the end of elementary school and the end of middle school, as part of the government’s statistical studies on education (see Repères et références statistiques sur les enseignements, la formation et la recherche [Statistical reference points on teaching, training, and research] 2013). In general, though, French students do not have anywhere near the familiarity with such testing formats as do American ones.
- 4.
In 2015, according to the French Ministry of Education, 77.2 percent of students in the appropriate age group sat for the baccalauréat exam. The 22.8 percent who did not do so mostly were enrolled in various kinds of vocational training, such as apprenticeships. The lycée itself is now divided into three separate tracks: “general” or pre-university (49 percent of the total lycée enrollment), “technological” (20 percent), and “professional” (31 percent). Students enrolled in the latter two pre-professional tracks still must undergo a literature exam as part of the bac in their penultimate year. (http://www.education.gouv.fr/cid56455/le-baccalaureat-2015-session-de-juin.html)
- 5.
Since 1880, partly as part of the strategy to diminish the educational role of the Catholic Church, the French Republic has had a monopoly on the authority to issue diplomas of higher education (“le monopole de la collation des grades”, Code de l’éducation, article L613-1). Because the bac is considered to be the first in the series of university degrees, it can only be issued by the government.
- 6.
Any anxiety that American high school students feel when taking the SAT, ACT, or even AP exams is small compared to the fear most French students have of the bac, even the relatively easier versions of today. Psychologically, there is at least some balance once the testing is over: American students in their final year are more likely to face debilitating stress over the college admissions and financial aid process. In France, once the bac is in hand, going to university is a relatively straightforward process, and while financial challenges exist, especially for students who do not plan to live with their parents, tuition fees are trivial. On the other hand, French universities experience higher student attrition rates over the first two years than American ones. There is no greener grass on either side of the fence, it seems.
- 7.
On the left of the political spectrum, for example, is sociologist Michel Fize and his book Le Bac inutile [The Useless Bac 2012], who argues for replacing the exam with “contrôle continu”, or grades earned throughout the student’s career. That is roughly how the American system works if one removes standardized national tests, which more and more colleges no longer require for admission. On the right, philosopher Thibaud Collin advocates a return to the past, complaining that because a large majority of the population now takes the bac, about 90 percent of whom pass, it has become “une grande tartufferie quasi soviétique” [a giant, quasi-soviet hypocrisy] (“Faut-il supprimer le baccalauréat ?” [should one eliminate the baccalauréat], Le Figaro, June 17, 2014). Of course, it is precisely because the bac is no longer an elitist institution that it can truly be considered part of general education, and in spite of these attacks, it shows no sign of going away soon.
- 8.
The written portion of the College Board’s Advanced Placement test in English literature is very close to the literature bac in its level of difficulty, and even in the kinds of tasks it requires. In the 2012 exam, students had to write three essays based on the following prompts, each prompt followed by a poem, excerpt, or list of works: (1) “In the following poem by Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), the speaker addresses the subject of desire. Read the poem carefully. Then write a well-developed essay in which you analyze how poetic devices help to convey the speaker’s complex attitude toward desire.” (2) “Carefully read the following excerpt from the novel Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena María Viramontes. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze the development of Estrella’s character. In your analysis, you may wish to consider such literary elements as selection of detail, figurative language, and tone.” (3) For their third essay, students are given a list of literary works and asked the following: “Choose a novel or play in which cultural, physical, or geographical surroundings shape psychological or moral traits in a character. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how surroundings affect this character and illuminate the meaning of the work as a whole.” (AP® English Literature and Composition Free-Response Questions). The biggest difference between this and the written portion of the bac is that the College Board recommends 40 minutes per essay, and the bac allows four hours for the short answer(s) plus one essay. Of course, the AP exam is taken by a relatively small minority of high school seniors, whereas the bac is mandatory for all lycée students.
- 9.
Those familiar with French secondary education often point out that the top grade, 20 out of 20, is almost never awarded. That is still mostly true, even though every year a few dozen students manage to pass the bac with an average grade in all subjects of 20. Today, one’s average can even be higher than twenty, thanks to a complicated system whereby a fraction of the grade received on an optional subject test can be added to the student’s average in all the required subjects. Thus, if a student’s average is already 19 or 20, which places him or her in the top tenth of one percent overall, the optional subject grade can increase the average to a number slightly higher than 20. (http://www.education.gouv.fr/cid80074/les-options-au-baccalaureat-general-en-2013-tres-peu-d-impact-sur-la-reussite.html). The fact that this happens so rarely, however, contributes to the long-held belief that the test is never a mechanical measure of achievement: the grades on the bac and the scores on the SAT, though both are numbers, at least appear to reflect entirely different standards of measurement, one subjective and human, the other objective and mechanical.
- 10.
Some may argue that, although imitating Latin and Greek authors does not constitute literary creation, it is nevertheless an excellent form of training for future authors. Indeed, most members of the pantheon of French literature up to the mid-twentieth century spent a portion of their school years on such exercises, which no doubt had a determining influence on their style. There is a large body of scholarship on the relationship between “classical” secondary education and literary production, whether on the French neoclassical period (Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle [Man and Ethics: Studies in French Classicism]), the reactionary anti-modernist movement in literature (Gaëlle Guyot, Latin et Latinité dans l’oeuvre de Léon Bloy [Latin and Latinity in the works of Léon Bloy]) and even on anti-establishment figures such as Arthur Rimbaud (Romain Jalabert, “Le latin dans l’œuvre de Rimbaud” [Latin in the Works of Rimbaud]). One must remember, however, that we are talking about general education: the fact that many French writers of the past had been influenced by the Latin compositions they created in their youth is interesting, but does not prove that such pedagogy was of benefit to their contemporaries who did not become literary authors, much less to the French population at large that is required to study literature today.
- 11.
See for example the interview of Marc Fumaroli in the conservative daily Le Figaro of March 31, 2015: “Les humanités au péril d’un monde numérique” [classical languages under threat from a digital world].
- 12.
The education of girls and young women was a separate institution. Even after the bac was officially opened to women in 1924 (there had been isolated instances of women passing the exam prior to that year), the segregation of schools by gender continued until well after the cultural revolution of May 1968. The story of female education and its relation to the issues discussed here is found in Rebecca Rogers’s work, including the landmark study From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France (2005). One very important aspect of female education is that even before the French Revolution, girls had far less exposure to classical languages than boys. The earliest secondary curricula in French literature were therefore mostly developed for female education. As a result, for many years expertise on national literature was more common among women than men, a fact that did not make the job easier for those who tried to make the study of French equal in prestige to the study of Greek and Latin.
- 13.
I use masculine pronouns when referring to lycée education prior to 1924, the year when girls were officially allowed to study for the bac, even though there had been individual cases of girls taking the bac since the mid-nineteenth century.
- 14.
The tiny, yet growing population of young men who attended the lycée was part of a much larger secondary school population. The secondary education levels in which the teaching of literature also grew in importance, mostly French as opposed to classical, were the years of collège immediately prior to the lycée; the institution of enseignement spécial, a Latin-free, pre-professional and practical alternative to the lycée instituted by Minister Victor Duruy in 1865; and the cours primaire supérieur, a continuation of primary education that was accessible to a much larger population than the social elite. Last but not least, a significant portion of the female population had its own system of public secondary education, established by Camille Sée in 1880. Each of these alternatives had its own exam apparatus that influenced the content of the curriculum the way the bac did for the lycée.
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Guiney, M.M. (2017). The Baccalauréat Exam and the French Canonical Literary Exercise. In: Literature, Pedagogy, and Curriculum in Secondary Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52138-1_3
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