John Lichfield: Are French schools top of the class?

'The object of primary education in France seems to be to teach children how to store facts and ideas, not to teach them to think'

Clare's teacher rang us at home at 7.30 in the evening. We were rather startled. Had there been a problem in class? Was Clare, aged six, being cheeky? Was she not not forming her "j's" in the manner approved by the French education ministry? Far worse than that. We were curtly informed that, Clare, one month after the French school year had restarted, was still in possession of two exercise books of unauthorised dimensions, serial numbers 3794, instead of 3796. What did we propose to do about it?

Clare's teacher rang us at home at 7.30 in the evening. We were rather startled. Had there been a problem in class? Was Clare, aged six, being cheeky? Was she not not forming her "j's" in the manner approved by the French education ministry? Far worse than that. We were curtly informed that, Clare, one month after the French school year had restarted, was still in possession of two exercise books of unauthorised dimensions, serial numbers 3794, instead of 3796. What did we propose to do about it?

We had purchased the books from the school, so it was, in truth, their mistake, not ours. Clare's form teacher made no allowance for that. She is an unusually bossy young woman, even by the standards of the French teaching profession. Her phone call tells you something, all the same, about the rigidity of the French school system and the domineering role that teachers often assume within it.

Two of our children have been in a French school in Paris for nearly four years. Grace, the third, has just started in the maternelle department or kindergarten, much to her shock. Grace is French, in the sense that she was born in France, but she does not yet speak French. After a month, she is settling down. She has equipped herself with three of the phrases that every small French girl needs:

"C'est à moi" (It's mine), "Je ne veux pas" (I don't want to) and "Oh là là" (various untranslatable meanings). The older children, 10 and six, have now done almost all of their schooling in French system. They speak utterly convincing French, which is, to me, a source of pride and shame (shame because mine is so much worse after trying to speak the language on and off for 37 years).

Otherwise, four years on, what do we make of the French school system? It tends to be much vaunted abroad (especially by supporters of the recently resigned Chief Inspector for Schools, Chris Woodhead), but it is endlessly criticised and fought over within France.

At the lower primary levels, there are many things to admire. There is a clear-minded (if relentless) focus on acquiring the basic tools of arithmetic, reading, grammar and hand-writing. In a British school between the ages of four and six, Charles was required to write ambitious little essays ("Pretend you were a child in the London Blitz") before he could form his letters properly. He was beginning to lose his way. In France, both he and Clare have thrived.

There are, however, a number of features that disturb us about the French educational system. The problems seem to get worse as you climb through the ranks of primary school and move into collÿge and lycée: a transition which faces Charles at the end of this school year.

There is the crushing tedium of a national curriculum, dominated by grammar and maths, and based on rote learning, rather than on any appeal to creativity. This is not just a question of drumming facts, Gradgrind-like, into unwilling young heads. The French approach is, at one and the same time, deadeningly factual and oddly abstract.

Thus, Charles and his friends aged nine and 10 learn not just the inescapable facts of French grammar but the theory of grammar. They rarely write anything original; instead they learn the theory of sentence construction. They have to memorise long passages explaining the difference between "direct objective complements" and "indirect objective complements", not forgetting "secondary objective complements" or "circumstantial complements" (of which there are 50 different types).

The object of primary education in France seems to be to teach children how to store facts and ideas in their heads; not to teach them how to think. The intention here is presumably to prepare them for the ocean-going storage of facts and ideas - and little imagination or questioning - that is demanded in French collÿges, lycées and universities.

There is something to be said for this approach for certain kinds of children: those, like Charles, who have plenty of imagination but a tendency to stray off course. However, the system has little flexibility, except in the hands of the most determinedly creative teachers, of which there are some.

Children who need a different approach easily get bored or left behind. One of Charles's best friends, Alain, is a slightly built boy, who struggles to school with a satchel that appears to exceed his body-weight. He is manifestly bright, but manifestly failing. Alain lost his footing in the blizzard of facts and theories about a year ago and is now being steadily buried by a system which blames him, not itself, for his failure.

Our second bugbear is the insane, school timetable, which the French call, rather pompously, the "rythmes scolaires". French schoolchildren spend fewer days in school - 170 - than those in any other developed country. To compensate, the primary school day is absurdly long, from 8.30am to 4.30pm, with a two-hour lunch break.

Much of the above has long been challenged by parents and politicians but never seriously threatened. Why? The answer raises the third aspect of French education which disturbs us: the power of teachers, not as individuals, but as a corporate body, a political force, a network of unions, a caste, a clan.

Consider this statement. "The school child's day (in France) is too long. Whoever you are - and it is especially true for children - you shouldn't be expected to concentrate deeply for more than four hours a day... But to erode the teachers' holidays in the interests of the children would be unthinkable... Any minister who suggested such a thing would explode within three days."

The passage comes from a book by Claude Allÿgre, who was fired earlier this year as education minister in Lionel Jospin's Socialist-led government (despite being a personal friend of Mr Jospin). Allÿgre, a child of teachers, himself a university teacher and world-respected academic, was booted out because he tried to challenge the power of the teachers' unions and give more influence and flexibility to individual teachers.

Allÿgre started from the principle (seemingly innocuous) that the school system should revolve around children. The teachers' unions took this as an insult. They said that the French school system had always - and should always - revolve around teachers, by which they meant the corporatist power of the teaching unions.

Allÿgre's essay, Toute Vérité Dire ("The truth is always worth telling") has been the best-selling non-fiction book in France over the last five weeks. His doomed attempt to let more light and air into French education has many sympathisers.

There is a temptation to compare Claude Allÿgre and Chris Woodhead. In a sense, the two men were trying to move the British and French systems towards one another. Woodhead, in Britain, was trying to impose a stricter curriculum, based on numeracy and literacy. Allÿgre, in France, was trying to encourage more creativity and imagination and give individual teachers more flexibility.

Hence a great paradox. In Britain, the teachers hated Woodhead because he appeared to be imposing rigid conditions on how, and what, they should teach. In France, the teaching unions (but not all teachers) hated Allÿgre because he wanted to dismantle a rigid system that gave teachers institutional power but demanded little creativity from individual maîtresses or instituteurs.

Claude Allÿgre's successor, Jack Lang, is paying lip service to reform but is, in truth, sucking up shamelessly to the immobilisme and selfishness of the French teachers' unions. Nothing much will change soon.

But would we, as parents, prefer to be back in Britain, where middle-class and caring mums and dads feel compelled to send their offspring to absurdly expensive and often indifferent private schools and, in doing so, fatally undermine the state system? Absolutely not.

Both countries get it wrong. In their different, perhaps clumsy ways, Allÿgre and Woodhead have been pushing in the right direction. In France, it is the power of the teachers' unions that prevents sensible change. In Britain, it is the Gadarene good intentions of the parents.