The Head of State went to a school in Marseille on Thursday, alongside the new Minister of National Education, Pap Ndiaye.
Visiting Marseille on Thursday in a “laboratory” school testing an educational experiment contested by the teachers’ unions, Emmanuel Macron declared that the ambition in the coming months was to extend this approach “everywhere on the territory”.
“Our ambition with the Minister is then in the coming months to be able to generalize this approach”, which consists of providing resources while also giving “more pedagogical freedom to teachers”, explained Emmanuel Macron in the presence of Pap Ndiaye in the Menpenti school in Marseille.
“It is a desire to find the salt of our republican school, that is to say in the face of all the challenges which are ours and which are very different from one territory to another”, continued the leader. of the State after visiting the mathematics laboratory set up in this school, one of the 59 selected in Marseille to carry out a specific project with the possibility for the director to participate in the choice of his team.
“We need to put more means but also to give more freedom to those who do by giving them the possibility of doing as you have given a sample”, he added to the address of the teachers present.
Teacher unions express reservations
One of the objectives of the mathematics laboratory set up in the Menpenti kindergarten is to “undermine determinism in certain children who say they are made or not made for math”, explained the director of the kindergarten. , Marie-Laure Mercun.
Questioned by the Minister of Education Pap Ndiaye, a parent noted “very positive first feedback, the children like to discover how to manipulate the environment”. But he adds, “we need human and financial resources so that everyone can go more”.
The teachers’ unions are worried about a possible two-speed school between those with additional projects and budgets and the others. Above all, they call for sustainable means everywhere and warn about an extension of this approach.
“It’s smoking. It was his project,” reacted Virginie Akliout, departmental secretary of the main teachers’ union, the Snuipp FSU, in the Bouches-du-Rhône. “Marseille was only a pretext (…), the school deserves better than the effects of communication which follow one another”, she lamented.
His deputy, Sébastien Fournier, deplores the banning of a demonstration in which he nevertheless participated with around thirty other people near the school.
“What will become of the kids in schools that do not carry out innovative projects?” Asks Isabelle Bonnet, teacher in a vocational school in the 11th arrondissement of Marseille.
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