France’s view of itself as a nation of mathematicians has taken a knock from surveys that show its children struggling to keep up internationally.
Politicians campaigning for the presidential elections are blaming each another over proof that the education system, one of the best-financed in the world, is failing pupils.
Ten-year-olds ranked last in Europe in mathematical skills and second-last in science, according to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, even though they study maths for 193 hours a year, compared with a European average of 158. School-leavers had also fallen to the bottom half of the international field.
All this in the nation that produced Blaise Pascal, 17th century inventor of the mechanical calculator, and Pierre de Fermat, whose “last theorem”, scribbled in the margin of a book, took later mathematicians hundreds of years to prove.
Ireland and Britain were the best European performers and Singapore and Hong Kong were top of the world.
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“The results are bad. Many French students are under-performing,” said Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the Socialist education minister. She and the rest of President Hollande’s government blamed François Fillon, who was prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, and now leads the presidential field.
“These [ten-year-old] pupils are the . . . sacrificed generation,” said Ms Vallaud-Belkacem. “They have paid a heavy price for the political decisions of yesterday, taken by the government of François Fillon.”
Standards are rising after more than four years of recruiting teachers and reforming the lower secondary system, she said.
“It is the fault of a caste of pretentious pedagogues who have been imposing their jargon-laden curricula for yearsFrançois Fillon
Mr Fillon, who was education minister more than a decade ago, blamed Socialist reforms, which critics say have dumbed down the curriculum and deprived children of basic skills in favour of vague “interdisciplinary studies”. “The collapse in our school results is not the fault of the teachers,” he said. “It is the fault of a caste of pretentious pedagogues who have been imposing their jargon-laden curricula for years.”
Mr Fillon, who is candidate for the centre-right Republicans, is pledging a back-to-basics reform — without raising spending — which would introduce such alien ideas as paying teachers according to their performance and letting schools use their own methods.
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French gloom over education was reinforced this month with stagnant, mediocre results in the latest Pisa scores, a ranking of educational performance by the OECD, the club of developed nations.
In the comparison of skills of 15-year-olds in 72 countries, France came 26th, behind Britain, Germany and much of the EU.
Until recently, France dismissed the Pisa league and other international rankings as biased towards inferior “Anglo-Saxon educational methods” but it now accepts them as a yardstick in the global contest.
The most shaming Pisa figure was France’s place as the European state with the biggest gap between the performance of rich and poor children.
The country’s once-admired education system has long been faulted by outsiders as rigid and demotivating. “In maths . . . there’s a lot of rote learning, learning of definitions, Pythagoras’s theorem,” said Irena Czekierska, a 58-year-old British woman who teaches English in a lower secondary school in the Dordogne. “I hear pupils complaining that they have to learn stuff off by heart . . . They don’t necessarily know how to apply it.”
