Each week, Olivier Babeau deciphers the times for FigaroVox. He is president of the Sapiens Institute and, moreover, professor of management sciences at the University of Bordeaux. He recently published
The New Digital Disorder: How Digital Is Exploding Inequalities
(Buchet Chastel, 2020).
Certain forms of discrimination are known, studied and fortunately fought.
Others are not so much talked about while they are also heavy consequences on professional destinies.
In the absence of awareness, no serious corrective action is taken and the resulting inequalities of opportunity remain.
Fluency in written language, that is, the ability to formulate messages in writing clearly and correctly, is an essential skill for success in many professions.
Rightly or wrongly (I tend to think rightly), the reader of a written production partly judges substance by form.
Most of the time, spelling - literally, "correct way to write" - correlates with the quality of the speech.
In addition to the inability to achieve chords, there is often faulty syntactic construction and the difficulty of ordering thought, just as the poverty of vocabulary feeds that of thought.
A study by the Ministry of National Education cited by L'Express showed that the percentage of students making less than six mistakes on the same dictation increased from 31% in 1987 to 16% in 2007 and 8% in 2015.
With general culture, spelling has suffered the opprobrium of new teachers.
It would be a bourgeois science specifically built to allow the distinction of the dominant classes.
Instead of drawing the conclusion that it was urgent to instill it in everyone, we thought we could pass it through profit and loss.
The rigor and repetitive work that his apprenticeship requires are no longer in fashion.
The school's inability to combat the inequalities of destiny based on social differences is rooted in this skill that it has absolutely given up on transmitting.
Democratization was possible: the school of the republic formerly succeeded perfectly in giving pupils obtaining a simple certificate of study excellent spelling (often associated with very beautiful writing).
Alas, mastery of spelling has once again become an aristocratic privilege.
A study by the Ministry of National Education cited by L'Express showed that the percentage of students making less than six mistakes on the same dictation rose from 31% in 1987 to 16% in 2007 and 8% in 2015. One PISA study establishes that in Belgium, the performance gap between upper and lower social classes is 10. Writing difficulties respond to reading difficulties: France has systematically declined in international rankings since 2001, with pupils reaching the level qualified as "advanced" being 4% for us, against 12% in the average of European countries.
A drop in the level which is obviously found in the population.
Analysis of the texts left by the French during the Great Debate showed an average of one mistake every 54 words, or one every five to six lines.
Interviewed by La Croix, Camille Martinez underlines:
"An email having an average of 150 words, it still makes three mistakes by email, that can do a lot."
We all make spelling mistakes, that's obvious.
And there are orthographic dyslexics (about 5% of an age group, I myself belonged to) who call for special support.
But the problem runs deeper than stumbling over the correct spelling of the word platypus.
The challenge for a long time is no longer to triumph over Mérimée's dictation with his famous calf legs and deer legs.
It is no longer a question of mastering the thousand and one subtleties of the past participle chord, but more prosaically of distinguishing it from the infinitive.
Spelling mistakes often highlight a misunderstanding of the function of the word and blur the point.
The absence of
s
distinguishing the conditional from the future has become classic.
The phonetic language that is used on social networks leaves a whole part of the population on the margins of the ability to really express themselves in writing.
Whether we like it or not, the ability to write is an important business skill, perhaps more so than the ability to speak.
In Les Echos, a professor of modern letters who teaches in a BTS in Seine-Saint-Denis affirms:
“The level of French is a real problem.
We are forced to cheat in the evaluations so as not to penalize the quality of the spelling or the expression, but this obviously has repercussions in the professional world.
The level of our students in French is a real problem. ”
Many employers and executives have told me how much, in the company, the low quality of writing was a stigma limiting the possibility of professional advancement.
Whether we like it or not, the ability to write is an important business skill, perhaps more so than the ability to speak.
It is sometimes pointed out that we are now in the civilization of video.
This is undoubtedly true for entertainment, but in the professional world, for many professions, the written word remains central.
For spelling, as for so many things, everything is played out in the early years of school.
Let us stop talking about equal opportunities without tackling this problem head-on and redo spelling - and more generally written expression - a central skill in learning.