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Alain Bentolila: "For twenty years, we have done almost nothing to fight against illiteracy"

2022-06-01T12:09:11.482Z


FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE - According to a report by the General Inspectorate for Education, Sport and Research, 5% of 16-year-olds are illiterate in France. For the linguist, this situation condemns those who experience it to the inability to name the real.


Alain Bentolila is a linguist, professor at Paris-Descartes University.

He is the author of about twenty books concerning in particular the illiteracy of young adults and the learning of reading and language in children.

A large proportion of the pupils take the long corridor of illiteracy which, from kindergarten to 3rd grade, crosses the school of the Republic.

They have always been behind on displayed skills.

They suffered from a major vocabulary deficit at age six;

they acquired some skills in deciphering words at age eight when they should have been able to understand texts of about fifteen lines;

they had difficulty in locating a few specific pieces of information at the age of twelve when they were expected to be autonomous readers capable of reading a tale, a mathematical statement or a scientific text with such efficiency.

They very early on put on the costume of failure and have never left it.

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Six children out of a hundred go to elementary school for more than ten years and do not understand a short and simple text;

six others are condemned to a surface reading that opens up no distance, no criticism.

On entering lower secondary school, 12% of pupils therefore now have reading difficulties that are serious enough to handicap their subject-based learning.

Brutally left to their own devices in the face of the demands of college, these students will sink, year after year, down the long corridor of illiteracy.

They will scrape by for two or three years, taking no advantage of their studies;

the institution will write them off as profit and loss.

Primary school kept them alive without really managing to bring them up to standard;

the college completes them.

There is a sort of scandal there.

Out of 100 students in difficulty in sixth grade, 94% will still be in third grade.

They will not have their college diploma at a time when the baccalaureate no longer guarantees anything.

A minority of them, more skilled in practical areas, will obtain a CAP because in the long run and, despite notorious shortcomings in general subjects, it will be considered that, all in all, they deserve it.

But – and this is essential – this CAP or BEP so difficult to obtain, they will have obtained it by default.

They will have been oriented towards these sectors not because they wanted to excel in a manual trade but because they were told that they were only good for that.

As long as we accept that the corridor of illiteracy leads “naturally” to technical and vocational education, we will mark this sector with the iron of shame and frustration.

The more we advance in this corridor which crosses our school, the more the doors of exit become rare, the more the conscience of the failure asserts itself, the heavier weighs a discouragement which will generate revolt and violence.

Alain Bentolila

From the big section of kindergarten through the age of 16, the numbers register with a stubborn and frightening consistency.

All pupils in difficulty in kindergarten are obviously not destined to illiteracy;

but the further one advances in this corridor which crosses our school, the more the exits become rare, the more the consciousness of failure asserts itself, the heavier weighs a discouragement which will engender revolt and violence.

When they leave this corridor where they have learned nothing but frustration, resentment and withdrawal, they are destined for linguistic confinement.

They are then forced to give up exercising this power specific to humans to transform, however slightly, others and the world through the peaceful exercise of oral or written language.

Illiteracy incites those who experience it to point out and radically qualify;

it therefore makes it difficult to question the definitive watchwords and explanatory principles of the world falsely presented as universal.

A student deprived of real linguistic power, in difficulty of conceptualization and argumentation, will not be able to take a distance conducive to reflection and analysis.

It will certainly be more permeable to all the sectarian and fundamentalist discourse that will claim to provide it with simple, immediate and definitive answers.

He can more easily be seduced by all the stereotypes that offer a dichotomous and Manichean vision of the world.

He will submit more docilely to the most rigid and arbitrary rules provided they give him the

Coming out of school, many children in this country have to face a world in which excessive credulity often proves fatal.

A world where discourse and texts of a totalitarian, sectarian and fundamentalist nature are presented under the cover of perfect grammatical correctness, often articulated according to flawless argumentation.

The refutation of these texts presupposes that one has been trained in questioning, in questioning, in demanding that one takes nothing of what is said or written for granted, whoever is the one who expressed.

To be capable of vigilance and resistance against all the perverse uses of language, to be ready to impose one's own speeches and one's own texts in accordance with one's just thoughts, this is what we owe to our young people if we want

The powerlessness to communicate with those who do not resemble them will make any attempt at peaceful, tolerant and controlled debate impossible.

Alain Bentolila

Oral and written language must make it possible to unite, to transcend divisions, to heal tears.

It certainly cannot annihilate religious and social differences, but it can make them audible to each other.

This is how it will contribute to preserving social ties and preventing this country from becoming a conglomeration of groups impermeable to each other, ready for all confrontations, all violence.

The powerlessness to communicate with those who do not resemble them will make any attempt at peaceful, tolerant and controlled debate impossible.

It condemns them to live in a world that has become beyond the reach of words, indifferent to the verb.

They are unaware of this time when we can express ourselves or even confront each other with words, rather than coming to blows… Or to arms.

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illiteracy has reduced some young people in this country to using means other than language to leave their mark: they loot, they bruise, they will kill because they cannot resign themselves to leaving no trace of their ephemeral existence here below. .

Their violence feeds on the inability to convince, the impossibility of explaining, disgust with themselves and the Other.

Violence today is silent.

We must denounce this fashionable trend which attempts to water down social and cultural distress, to disguise certain painful handicaps, by diluting them in the vague concept of cultural diversity under the demagogic pretext of avoiding stigmatization.

Having difficulty reading and even more difficulty writing has nothing to do with identity;

this aggravates social marginalization and makes the chances of getting out of it more unlikely.

To be politically correct, should we content ourselves with describing, with admiration and amusement, the astute strategies of citizens who struggle to circumvent the daily obstacles imposed on them by their reading and writing difficulties?

To escape the accusation of conservatism, must we marvel at the liveliness and picturesqueness of a language of young people which encloses more than it liberates?

Finally, in the name of the right to difference (and indifference), should we accept that some are deprived of going as far as themselves to discover the writing of another and that they are prohibited from propose their thoughts to

intelligence of another with a chance of being understood?

If illiterate men and women are entitled to our respect and our solidarity, illiteracy which makes it difficult to exercise their citizenship is in no way acceptable;

the sociological description of this phenomenon does not confer on it any letter of socio-cultural nobility.

All those who have painful misunderstandings with the oral and written language find themselves living more difficultly than others.

Alain Bentolila

That this concept covers linguistic difficulties of very different natures and degrees, no one doubts;

that it refers to diverse social and cultural situations, we are convinced of that.

For all that, all those who have painful misunderstandings with the oral and written language find it harder to live than the others;

they are less likely to decide their social destiny;

they are more vulnerable to sectarian and fundamentalist texts.

Illiteracy thus poses a problem for our country that goes far beyond the sole question of reading and writing.

To be illiterate today is to be prevented from participating in the development of this country because one is deprived of the minimum means necessary for social and economic advancement.

To be illiterate today is to be enclosed in a narrow circle of complicity and closeness, cut off from social communication and common culture.

To be illiterate today is to be vulnerable to dangerous speeches and texts carried by unscrupulous individuals.

Finally, to be illiterate is to be more immediately inclined to take violent action because argumentation and explanation have become difficult.

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illiteracy in short often accompanies precariousness and marginalization and makes the paths of exit infinitely difficult.

It is therefore urgent to act with as much relevance as ambition.

What have we really done to reduce illiteracy in France among adults?

For more than twenty years we have been indignant at the sight of illiteracy figures;

we urge teachers, trainers, parents, we appeal to volunteers, we create useless agencies and yet the situation has slowly but surely deteriorated.

Does this mean that no funds have been allocated to social integration?

Far from it !

But in all these integration programs, the fight against illiteracy has remained the poor relation.

The main thing has too often been to present honorable statistics of professional placements which are all the more precarious as the necessary mastery of basic knowledge is neglected.

The essential reform on apprenticeship will have little

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-06-01

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