When Agnes van Zanten -director of research at the prestigious Center National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and world reference in the study of inequalities in education-, arrived in France in 1982 to do his doctorate, working with reports from 360 areas called “priority education” in the country. Reports that, four decades later, he still remembers. They are the same enclaves in which in recent days the social gap in France has once again become evident.
“Nothing has changed; perhaps some immigrants improved and left, but others replaced them,” says the sociologist, who is in Barcelona this week to participate in an international meeting on education and social inequalities. “As long as the young people of the lower class of France feel rejected, stigmatized and ‘ghettoised’ in certain geographical contexts, the latent social conflict that can awaken at any moment will continue; and this affects the entire French society because it paralyzes the entire political apparatus”, she warns.
“As long as lower-class youth in France feel rejected and ‘ghettoised’, the latent social conflict will continue”
-Could the school close that wound?
-School is important, but there must also be employment. Many of those who have taken to the streets these days in France are still in school, they are very young; but there are also those who have finished and are unemployed. But obviously the school is still one of those spaces in which social cohesion can be worked on, breaking with that feeling of being second-class citizens. Whenever I have interviewed a young immigrant, they are perfectly aware of the hierarchy between schools and the hierarchy between classes within the school itself; of ‘I’m in the garbage can class’ (common expression in France). The students are fully aware of this and this generates a dissatisfaction that will always be there. A feeling of ‘I was not treated with dignity’, ‘I don’t totally belong’.
“School is still one of those spaces where social cohesion can be worked on”
-Can the advance of the extreme right make the situation even worse?
-Of course. We already see it in the laboratories that are the cities in which the extreme right already governs with the decisions they have made in the schools. There are cities in France where attempts have been made to prevent children from refugee families from eating in the school canteen.
“In France we talk about third and fourth generation immigrants. How long is one an immigrant?”
-As?
-Yes, because they were not legally in France it was said that they had no right. Ultimately they couldn’t do it, but they tried. There have been attempts to divide among the good immigrants, those who integrate, those who are legal; and the ‘bad guys’. When I arrived in France at the beginning of the 1980s, I was very struck by the fact that they were talking about second-generation immigrants, but now we are talking about third- and even fourth-generation immigrants. How long is one an immigrant?
-Even when?
-It depends a lot if one belongs to a visible minority or not. In France, Polish, Spanish or Italian immigrants are no longer referred to as second or third generation, but those from visible minorities are still called second or third generation immigrants.
-She is a great defender of the fact that students progress more in heterogeneous classes.
-The mix is very positive, especially among middle-level students. On the one hand, it has to do with the attitude of the teacher. It is this idea that the most important thing for students to progress is for teachers to believe that students can progress. It seems a bit stupid as a reflection, but if teachers do not believe that students can progress, it has been shown that they do not progress, it is the so-called ‘Pygmalion Effect’. When ghettos are formed, teachers think that students cannot progress and that makes them adapt the knowledge they are taught, the educational methods, the evaluation…
– ‘Second’ schools.
-I studied that a lot in my book ‘The school of the periphery’. What I observed is that many teachers made the program very simple. In France we have national programs and all schools have to follow the same national program, but in schools on the periphery many times the teachers say: ‘no, here the students will never be able to do this math exercise; we’re going to do exercises 1 and 2, but 10, which requires more complex knowledge, we won’t get there”. Thus, although on paper it is the same national program, in reality it is not. And the methods also change. If it is a A group that has a lot of reading problems, we show them a lot of films. And the evaluation, the same. They are valued more for their attitude than for their results and we say ‘they respected, at least they were ahead of the test and they didn’t leave’.
The most important thing for students to progress is for teachers to believe that they can progress
-The mix raises, then, the collective aspirations?
-On the one hand there is the factor that has to do with the teachers and on the other the one that has to do with the students. The idea of a student being next to another with a slightly higher level than him creates a transfer between students; although it can be done in a bad way. Copying the one who is writing next to me will help me acquire certain knowledge. Talk to these students, have them as a model, go to their homes, exchange with them, access the cultural capital of their parents if they become friends… Those are the advantages in terms of learning, but there are also many advantages in terms of social cohesion. You learn to respect others, values of tolerance… The feeling of insecurity that so many people have in society and that generates so many problems also goes down with the mix. You know people better. But at the same time, the mixture cannot be conceived as something arithmetic. It is not enough to put the children together for it to work.
“Teachers have to be able to teach heterogeneous groups, and in France that is a problem”
-What else is needed?
There must be two important elements. First, teachers have to be able to teach heterogeneous groups. In France this is a big problem, because teachers have a very high level of training in their subject, especially in secondary school, but they have very little pedagogical training, and practically no training in leading groups of different levels. And, when that context occurs, perhaps they are only going to address the students with the highest level and they are going to leave the others. Or the students in the middle, but still leaving the lower level…
Politicians tend to spend a lot of time making announcements, presenting new things, and care little about the implementation of programs
-And then?
-In the US, a lot of work was done in the 70s and 80s with racial desegregation policies and many researchers showed that if black and white students were put in the same school and nothing was done, in reality there were more stereotypes, more discrimination, more stigma…
-How should we do it, then?
-This mixture has to be accompanied by a pedagogical and social project in the school that works that the mixture is a richness, that works how to avoid stigmatizing practices. A policy of talking about religions in the world… If we don’t have that policy, maybe they will leave them in a group and the four Muslim students will always play together at recess. What I want to say is that there is nothing magical, you have to work at it.
-One of the pending subjects in the Catalan school is the diversity among teachers. The student body is of diverse origin, but the vast majority of teachers are white. Are they better in France?
-In France there are positive discrimination programs and a greater awareness of representing diversity in the media, in large companies, but in the field of education, the competitive exams to be a teacher are very demanding and many students who when they start at university they would like to apply for a teaching post, they fail the exam.
-Would you bet on positive discrimination to access teaching?
-Yes, especially if accompanied. The fact of lowering meritocratic barriers is important, but in the US we have many examples that this is not really enough if there is no scholarship policy.
Related news
-Are measures such as increasing the age of compulsory education up to 18 effective in favoring social cohesion?
-The devil is in the details. How is that policy implemented? There has to be a scholarship program, go convince families of the advantages of continuing to study… It is very difficult for these policies to have an automatic effect. There has to be an accompaniment. Politicians tend to spend a lot of time making announcements, introducing new things, and they care very little about the implementation of the programs. And when programs fail, they say they offered families a great opportunity and they didn’t take advantage of it. But they have not taken into account all the factors. Many lower-class parents think that if their children have a very long education they are going to get away from them, they are going to lose contact, the family is going to disintegrate.