This practice is very much in the minority today. However, 60% of French people say they are in favor of it.
This practice is very much in the minority today. However, 60% of French people say they are in favor of it.
Director of the Catholic college under contract Jeanne-d'Arc de Castelsarrasin (Tarn-et-Garonne), Marc Ternisien decided, this fall 2017, to impose the uniform in his establishment. Students wear a designer navy hoodie, sweater and navy polo shirt with the school motto (“Above all, charity”) for a total budget of 107 euros. The request came from “many parents”, he explains. Since the rules of procedure were already strict on the style of dress, "they asked us why we were not going to the end". Very favorable to the uniform, this director criticizes “the growing social differences in the playgrounds” and the children “who have become traveling advertising marks”. Three months after the start of the school year, he believes that “in this troubled period, the uniform creates a feeling of belonging”. Another consequence “which we did not expect”, teachers and students “are forced to look into each other's eyes a lot more and memorize their faces. We are no longer talking about the-little-Lucie-in-apple-green!”. The criticisms, according to him in the minority, come from parents and teachers hostile to what they perceive as a desire for uniformity.
Jean-Michel Blanquer, he assumes. "We have to allow institutions who want to develop it,” the minister told the “Grand Jury RTL-Le Figaro-LCI” on Sunday. While 60% of French people say they are in favor of it in the polls, this question has come up regularly since Xavier Darcos, then Minister Delegate for School Education, raised it in 1993 in the midst of a debate on religious symbols. The "establishment" of a uniform is regularly carried by the right to the point of becoming a safe haven. It is almost systematically part ofhe presidential promises of LR candidates.
In reality, each private and public establishment has always been able to require the wearing of uniform in the internal regulations. But this practice is ultra-minority, for lack of demand from parents and teachers. Confined, for historical reasons, to around ten military-inspired public education establishments (like the education house of the Legion of Honor) and at the seven military high schools, the uniform has however imposed itself in a third of overseas high schools since the 1980s. of Sourdun (Seine-et-Marne), created at the time of Nicolas Sarkozy. The Toulouse public college Pierre-de-Fermat had tried to impose it in 2014 with the support of parents, but a new management threw the project into oblivion. In private education under contract, where the blouse and the apron were widespread until the years 1968, the latter fell into disuse but dozens of schools and colleges are resisting, observes Karine Peyre de Sabrègues, director of the company Blouses et Tabliers, which supplies about fifteen establishments. She has observed a "tremor" of requests for three years. At the direction of Catholic education, we judge the desire for a “rather stable” uniform and above all linked to the desire to fight against the omnipresence of brands.
More middle school singers in 2019
The Ministries of Education and Culture will devote 20 million euros to the development of choirs during school time, announced Jean-Michel Blanquer and Françoise Nyssen during a trip to the Gustave-Flaubert college in Paris on Monday . Each school and college should have a choir "by 2019". The plan provides for the creation "from the start of the 2018 school year, of a new optional education of 2 hours per week in 7000 colleges". The Minister of Education clarified on France Musique that it is necessary to "recreate an ecosystem favorable to music". This plan is in line with the "Rentrée en musique", implemented in September.
"The national impetus will be boosted and the funding more than tripled: we go from 160.000 euros to 500.000 euros with our partners", says the Ministry of National Education. It will be a question in particular of widely developing partnerships between schools and local cultural structures. Or to increase the number of hours of musicians involved thanks to the 3 million from the Ministry of Culture.
