France: Instrumentalization of the COVID-19 Against School Equality?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has put education systems to the test. This article deals with the French case, whose educational system was confined for two months, then resumed very partially and selectively before the summer, only really functioning again in September, under unprecedented conditions. It shows that far from being an exceptional parenthesis, the health crisis was used by the government to try to impose structural changes. These conclusions stem from an analysis of the rationale that was previously under way in the projects to reform French education, which makes it possible to distinguish between punctual responses to an exceptional situation and attempts to exploit the pandemic. The government’s attempts to renounce to equality and school democratisation, by reducing the content taught to all pupils, to transfer to families the responsibility and financing of entire disciplines and the content in other subjects, through the development of online learning, and the transfer to the private sector and local authorities of some educational content that would no longer be included in national curricula in the long term. These policies of public disengagement and competition among pupils are the result of approaches which are already at work, since the French education system has hitherto been the subject of an unstable compromise between the logic of social selection and the logic of democratisation of studies.