Lisa Kamen-Hirsig is a teacher, columnist and essayist. She is the author of “La Grande Garderie
” (Albin Michel, 2023).
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Monday morning.
I learn that my youngest son's teacher will be away all week.
A nasty virus.
As I work part-time, I take the news in a positive light, delighted to spend two days alone with my stubborn little one.
On the program: drawing, reading, walks and baking.
My “mini-me” has already spotted a recipe for chocolate-smarties mousse
“that we can eat for a snack, eh say mom?”
.
Yes.
We will be able to.
However, I have not forgotten that, during this time, his classmates in preparatory classes whose parents work are reduced to coloring mandalas all day long, supervised by passing adults.
It amuses them on the first day –
“We didn’t do anything, it was so good!”
- but already much less the second -
“We did nothing again.
I like it better when the teacher is there.
She’s actually funny!”
.
By the third day, they have generally lost all desire to go to class: “Say, don’t you want to take me to the office?
I will not bother you.
Promise, promise, promise!
".
Monday evening.
Like all parents, I received a message telling me the extreme difficulty of finding a replacement teacher despite the good will put in place.
I then wrote to the principal, offering to replace my son's teacher but also, more generally, the teachers who were absent on Mondays and Tuesdays.
I have a ready-made CV, my school teacher diploma and a bit of a bottle as they say: twenty years of experience and numerous replacements at short notice.
I am already looking forward to tomorrow.
I list the readings and calculation games that I would offer to first graders and I go through my son's notebooks to be sure that I am in the “continuity of learning”.
But the verdict quickly falls: it’s impossible.
A tenured teacher attached to a rectorate cannot replace an absent teacher in another rectorate.
It’s like asking to work abroad… Ah.
But where is the famous “one and indivisible Republic”?
Even the army no longer forces anyone, while our children are required to be present 4 to 6 days a week, from 3 to 16 years old, on the benches of a school which, after having given up on educating them, does not even bothers to organize a daycare worthy of the name.
Lisa Kamen-Hirsig
When I was a child, we kept saying
“impossible is not French”
.
I understood that France was the country of courage, creativity, freedom and initiative.
Was she?
I do not really know.
Whatever the case, today, those who govern it have made it the country of impossibility, of impediment, of hindrance.
By dint of standards and rules, they make an old helpless person.
While successive governments seek to regulate and limit the freedoms of all, entire classes suffer the consequences, moving from magical coloring to prolonged playtime instead of learning to read, write and count.
As I write these lines, the rectorate is looking for someone.
The qualities and experience of this person do not matter: what matters is their attachment to the right office at the right academy.
In a country where overadministration is the rule, civil servants must be kept busy.
The educational institution is the only one where conscription still applies.
Even the army no longer forces anyone, while our children are required to be present 4 to 6 days a week, from 3 to 16 years old, on the benches of a school which, after having given up on educating them, does not even bothers to organize a daycare worthy of the name.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in his thrilling
War Pilot
, wrote:
“Just as the machine is built to administer a succession of movements planned once and for all, so administration does not create either.
It manages.
It applies such a sanction to such a fault, such and such a solution to such a problem.
An administration is not designed to solve new problems
.
However, France will have to stop relying entirely on an administration and regain its freedom to resolve new problems.
The severe lack of teachers is one of them.
During these two days, my son and I had time to do a thousand things.
In particular, he asked me to read
Gulliver's Travels
.
Well, you know what?
The countries crossed by the famous marine surgeon did not seem more zany to us than today's France.