Today's Date:

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let me take the opportunity of the start of the new school year, the first since my election as President of the Republic, to write to you.

I should like to talk to you about our children’s future. Their future is in the hands of each one of you whose responsibility it is to instruct, guide and protect minds and sensibilities as yet not fully formed or fully mature, still feeling their way, still fragile and vulnerable. It is your responsibility to assist in the blossoming of their intellectual potential, their moral sense, their physical abilities from earliest childhood and throughout their adolescence. This responsibility is one of the heaviest but also the most marvellous and rewarding.

Helping intelligence and sensibility to blossom, to find their way, what indeed could be greater, more marvellous? But what could also be harder? For along with pride in seeing children grow up, and their characters and judgement develop, along with the joy of passing on what each of us feels is most precious within us, there is always the fear of error, of holding back talent, of dampening enthusiasm, of being too lax or too strict, of failing to understand children’s innermost depths, what they feel and are capable of achieving.

To educate is to seek to reconcile two contradictory impulses: one to help every child find his or her own way forward, and the other to inculcate what we ourselves believe to be justice, truth and beauty.

Any adult dealing with a child growing up has a duty: not to stifle the child’s personality, without abandoning the effort to educate. All children, all adolescents are individuals with their own way of thinking and feeling. They must be able to express it. But they also need to learn.

For many years, education took no account of the child’s personality. All children were forced into a single mould; they all had to learn the same things, at the same time, in the same way. Nothing was more prized than knowledge. Education of this kind had its own grandeur. Demanding and rigorous, it encouraged the raising of standards; it led pupils, despite themselves, to exceed their own expectations.

The demanding, strict nature of such education made it a powerful factor for upward social mobility. But many children suffered because of it, and found themselves excluded from its benefits. This was not because they lacked talent or were incapable of learning and understanding, but because their particular sensibility, intelligence or character made them ill-suited to the single framework forced upon all.

Reacting in a way to this, recent decades have seen the child’s personality, rather than knowledge, made the central focus of education.

Attaching greater importance to what is special in a child, what enables children to express their individuality, their character, their own psychology, was necessary and healthy. It was important to allow all children to get the best out of themselves, develop their strengths and correct their weaknesses. But by attaching excessive value to spontaneity, being too afraid of constricting the child’s personality, seeing education only through the prism of psychology, we have gone to another extreme. We have no longer devoted enough effort to handing down values.

In the past, education very probably focused too much on nurture and not enough on nature. Nowadays there is perhaps too much nature and not enough nurture. In the past, too much importance was attached to the handing down of knowledge and values. Nowadays, on the contrary we no longer attach enough.

And as a result, the teacher’s authority has been undermined, as has that of parents and institutions.

The common culture handed down from generation to generation, enriched on the way by each generation’s contribution, has crumbled to the point that it is harder to communicate with or to understand each other.

Poor performance at school has reached unacceptable levels.

Inequality in the face of knowledge and culture has worsened at precisely the time when everywhere in the world the knowledge society has been imposing its rationale, its criteria and its demands. The chances of upward social mobility have diminished for children of families unable to pass on what schools no longer pass on.

However, it would be pointless to seek to revive a golden age of education, culture and knowledge which has never existed. Every age generates its own expectations.

We won’t recreate the schools of the Third Republic, or those of our parents, or even our own. Our task is to take up the challenge of the knowledge economy and the information revolution.

What we have to do is lay down the principles of education for the twenty-first century, which cannot just be those of yesterday and even less with those of the day before.

What do we want our children to become? Free women and men, curious about beauty and greatness, kind-hearted, spirited, capable of loving, thinking for themselves, reaching out and opening up to others, and also of learning a trade and earning a living from their work.

Our role is not to help our children stay children, or even become “big kids”, but help them become adults, become citizens. We are all involved in education.

Educating is difficult. It is often necessary to start all over again to achieve the goal. We must never be discouraged. Or be afraid to persist. In every child there is potential needing only to be fulfilled. Every child has a form of intelligence needing only to be developed. We must seek these. We must understand these. Just as education is demanding for children, it also makes personal demands on those dispensing it.

The goal is neither to be content with a predetermined minimum, nor submerge children under a flood of information too voluminous for them to assimilate any of it. The goal is to endeavour to give individual children the maximum amount of instruction they can each take in while encouraging to the utmost their desire to learn, their curiosity, their openness of mind, and their understanding of the value of effort. Self-esteem must be the mainspring of this approach to education.

Instilling self-esteem in all our children and all our country’s adolescents by getting them to discover that they have talents enabling them to achieve what they would never have believed they could: in my opinion, that is the philosophy that must underpin the radical reform of our education system.

We owe our children the same love and the same respect that we expect from them. The love and respect we owe them require that our relationship with them must not contain any element of abdication of responsibility or demagogy.

Because we love and respect our children, the upbringing we give them must make them grow in stature, not belittle them.

Because we love and respect our children, we cannot give up the task of educating them at the first sign of difficulty. Because children find it hard to concentrate, can’t learn quickly or have difficulty taking in lessons does not mean they should be deprived of the treasure trove of learning without which they will never be able to become truly free human beings.

Because we love and respect our children, we have a duty to teach them to set themselves high standards. We have a duty to teach them that everything is not of equal worth, that all civilizations are founded on a scale of values, that the pupil is not the equal of the teacher. We have a duty to teach them that no one can live without constraints and that there can be no freedom without rules. What kind of educators would we be if we didn’t teach our children to differentiate between right and wrong, between what is permitted and what is prohibited? What kind of educators would we be if we weren’t capable of disciplining our children when they do wrong? Children assert themselves by saying no. We do them a disservice if we always say yes. A feeling of impunity is disastrous for children, because they are constantly testing the limits imposed on them by the adult world. We are not educating children if we let them believe they are allowed to do everything, that they have only rights and no duties. We are not educating them if we let them believe that life is only a game or that the availability online of all the world’s knowledge means that they don’t need to learn anything. Information technology must be at the heart of our reflection on education in the twenty-first century, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the human relationship between educator and child is still essential and education also has to instill in children a taste for effort, get them to discover as a reward the joy of understanding after lengthy intellectual effort.

Rewarding merit, punishing wrongdoing, cultivating admiration for what is right, just, beautiful, great, true and profound, and detestation of what is wrong, unjust, ugly, small-minded, deceitful, superficial and mediocre: this is how those who educate can best serve the children they are responsible for and how they can best express the love and respect they feel for them.

And respect is precisely what has to underpin all education. The teacher’s respect for the pupil, that of parents for their children, of pupils for their teachers, and children for their parents; respect for others and self-respect – that is what education has to generate. If there is no longer enough respect in our society, I am convinced that the primary reason is a problem of education and upbringing.

I want us once again to teach respect. I want our children to learn politeness, open-mindedness and tolerance, which are all forms of respect.

I want pupils to bare their heads when at school and stand up when a teacher enters the room, because these are marks of respect.

I want every child taught respect for points of view they don’t hold, for beliefs they don’t share, for faiths which are alien to them; I want them to be taught to understand the extent to which difference, contradiction and criticism, far from being obstacles to freedom, are, on the contrary, sources of personal enrichment.

Having our thinking and certainties challenged, being made to reach out to others, to open up our minds to their reasoning, their feelings, and take others seriously prompts us to question our own convictions, our own values, to force ourselves to make greater efforts and so excel ourselves. That is why we must retain – even though we need to reform it – our Republican model of schooling, which brings together pupils of all origins, social classes and faiths, and imposes a duty of neutrality with regard to everyone’s religious, philosophical and political beliefs, respecting them all.

This model has weakened, and its principles are no longer sufficiently respected. The reason I want to move gradually towards the abolition of school catchment areas is precisely because I want there to be less segregation.

The reason I want to reform the single “collège” [school attended by all French children between the ages of 11 and 15] is to enable each child to find his or her right place, to ensure that more account is taken of individual differences in speed of learning, sensibility, character and forms of intelligence to improve every child’s chances of success. The reason I want disabled and special needs children to attend mainstream schools is not simply to ensure their happiness but so that the other children are enriched by their differences.

The reason I want schools, above all, to remain secular is because secularism is in my view a principle of mutual respect and because it opens up space for dialogue and peace between religions, because it is the surest way of countering the temptation to retreat into closed faith communities. Faced with the risk of a confrontation between religions which would open the door to a clash of civilizations, what better defence do we have than a few great universal values and secularism? Despite this, I am convinced that we must not exclude from school the teaching of the concept of religion. The birth of the great religions and their visions of humanity and the world must be studied, not of course to proselytize in any way, or as part of any theological approach, but in the context of a sociological, cultural and historical analysis which can give pupils a better understanding of the concept of religious faith. Spirituality and a sense of the sacred have accompanied the human adventure since the dawn of time. They are at the wellsprings of every civilization. It is easier for us to open up to others, to talk to them when we understand them. But learning to accommodate difference must not lead us to neglect participation in a common culture, a collective identity and shared moral values. To educate is to awaken individual consciousness and to raise it by degrees to a universal consciousness, it means ensuring that every one of us feels ourselves a unique person and at the same time an integral part of humanity as a whole. Between the two there is something essential that no approach to education can ignore. Between individual and universal consciousness there is, for us, in France, a national consciousness and a European consciousness.

Between the consciousness of belonging to the human species and that of having an individual destiny, education must also awaken civic consciousness, must shape us as citizens. Our children will never be world citizens if we are incapable of making them French and European citizens.

Naturally, the family plays a key role in handing down a national identity. But school is the melting pot. In referring to school, I have in mind not just citizenship studies, which must regain a prominent place in all primary and secondary schools. I am not thinking only of the handing down of moral values such as human rights, gender equality and secularism, which are all at the heart of our identity. I also have intellectual values in mind, our own particular way of thinking and reflecting. I am thinking here of our French tradition of clear thinking, of our liking, a very French trait, for universal reason, found not only in our philosophy and science, but also in our language, literature and art. In the face of the threat of global uniformity, it is our duty to promote cultural diversity. This duty obliges us to begin by defending our own identity, to take what is best from our intellectual, ethical and artistic tradition and pass it on to our children so that they can keep it alive for the benefit of everyone. Because the heritage of every culture and every civilization belongs to the whole of humanity. We ourselves are heirs to all the conquests, all the creations of the human spirit. We are heirs to all the great civilizations which have contributed to the mutual fertilization of cultures which is in the process of creating the first worldwide civilization.

Opening our children’s minds to what is universal and to the dialogue between cultures is not a denial of what we are. It is an accomplishment. France has always put universalism at the centre of her thinking and values. France has always seen herself as heir to all the world cultures which have made their contribution to the idea of humanity.

We must put general knowledge back at the centre of our ambitions for education. Of course, the ultimate goal of such general knowledge must not be the unending accumulation of information, but knowledge which has been thought through, ordered and assimilated. Neither exhaustiveness nor quantity should be the aim, but rather what is essential, and of high quality, and the linking-up of different fields of human intelligence to enable every child and adolescent to construct their own vision of the world. For the first time in history, children know many things their parents do not. But such knowledge needs to be transformed into culture and illuminated by the whole legacy of human wisdom and intelligence.

We must not compartmentalize, isolate or pit the different forms of knowledge against each other. Subject-based teaching must stay because each subject has its own rationale, because it is the only way of getting to the heart of it. But it needs to be backed by a global overview, to be put in perspective and related to all the others. In addition to the traditional categories of information, I am convinced that we must now put in place the basis for a new form of knowledge: the fruit of the combination, blending and mutual fertilization of every subject.

I am not in favour of every school using the same textbooks. Nor am I in favour of the globalization of knowledge, which is a recipe for confusion. But I do believe that cross-curricular teaching must very soon find a place in our schools because the future will be found in the interweaving of knowledge, cultures and viewpoints. I believe this to be one of the keys to our intellectual, moral and artistic Renaissance. General knowledge must be a constant concern. And when our children learn foreign languages, I want it to be compulsory to learn at least two in addition to French, and learning them must also involve learning about culture and civilization. I want our children to learn languages through literature, theatre, poetry, philosophy and science.

Saying that general knowledge is important in education – where it has been so downgraded to the benefit of specialization which is often excessive and introduced too early – means quite simply that scientists, engineers and technicians must not be ignorant of literature, art and philosophy, and that writers, artists and philosophers must not be ignorant of science, engineering and mathematics.

The idea that an individual wanting to study science should have no interest in poetry, theatre or philosophy is an idea I find absurd. The idea that a child born into a family of modest means, a child born in a problem neighbourhood beset by multiple disadvantages, that the sons and daughters of clerical and manual workers have no need to be introduced to the great works of the human mind, that they are incapable of appreciating them, and that learning to read, write and count is quite sufficient, is for me one of the worst expressions of contempt.

If so many adolescents are unable to express what they feel, so many young people in our country are no longer able to express their emotions, their feelings, or communicate them to others, to find the right words for love or pain, if many among them can no longer express themselves other than through aggression, brutality and violence, it is perhaps also because they have not been introduced to literature, poetry, or any of the forms of art capable of expressing what is most moving, the deepest pathos and tragedy of human beings.

In this era of video, mobile telephones, the Internet and instant communication, our children’s need for general knowledge is not diminished, but increased. They have greater need of the capacity to analyse, of critical judgement, of benchmarks. The more knowledge the world produces, the more data it generates, the greater the demand for culture for those who want to remain free, to control their own destinies. In the world as it now is, with its increasingly numerous and pressing demands, our children need more humanism and more science. And in both these domains we have yielded too much ground.

Flying in the face of our intellectual traditions, the humanist culture is wilting and scientific culture regressing. We have to fight on both fronts, to give children at an early age a taste for reading, art and science.

But we must revise the way we pass knowledge on. For too long, in our education system it has been acceptable for children to receive knowledge passively. There has very probably been too much criticism of learning things by heart, which is useful for training memory. And who can complain about having some La Fontaine fables or Verlaine verses etched on their memory, or of having a grasp of the timeline of France’s history or the geography of the world, of having recited their times-tables and the common formulae used in arithmetic and geometry? But genuine education demands more than recitation. It becomes deeply rooted only with the arousal of conscience, intelligence and curiosity. We have to get children to question things, ponder, stand back, react, doubt, discover for themselves the truths which will serve them throughout their lives.

Our education must become less passive, less mechanical. It must also reduce the excessive emphasis too often given to doctrine, theory and abstract ideas which discourages many bright pupils and leads them to close their minds. We must put greater emphasis on observation, experimentation, representation and practical applications.

I am convinced that this way we will make school more interesting to more children and reduce the failure rate in schools. This applies equally to science, the humanities and arts. For knowledge to become more real, more concrete, it is necessary to open up the world of education to a greater extent to the other worlds – of culture, art, research, technology and, of course, business, which will be the one in which most of our children will one day live their adult lives.

Our children must meet writers, artists, researchers, craftsmen and -women, engineers and entrepreneurs who will get them to share their love of beauty, truth, discovery and creativity. Ties must be woven between cultural institutions, research centres, the world of publishing, industry and primary, collèges and lycées [catering for pupils aged between 15 and 18].

Children must not stay confined to their classrooms. Very early on, they must go to theatres, museums, libraries, laboratories and workshops. Very early on, they must be confronted with the beauties of nature and initiated into its mysteries. Physics, geology, biology, geography, history lessons and also poetry often have greater impact and meaning when taught in forests, fields, mountains and on beaches. Our children must also be taught to look at masterpieces produced by both artists and by nature. And there must be no hesitation in putting them in contact with the great works of the human spirit and with those who keep these alive.

Our children won’t all be musicians, poets, scientists, engineers or craftsmen and -women. But we must not give up the idea of giving a child who will never be a musician a taste for music, a child who will never be a poet a taste for poetry, a child who will never be a researcher a taste for scientific discipline and a passion for research. And a child who will never be a craftsman or -woman, a love of a job well done and a technique mastered.

This is true for all children, all adolescents, regardless of their origin, social milieu, and whether they attend a traditional academic or vocational school. Since differentiating between manual and intellectual activities is another failing of our traditional education system. An absurd division which must be abolished so that vocational courses are recognized as “courses of excellence” in the same way as the others.

There is another division we must transcend: the one between physical and intellectual activities. Education is a whole. It must include both theoretical and practical, intellectual and physical, and arts and sporting activities. Too little time is still allocated to sport. Children need to push themselves. But sport also teaches respect for others, respect for rules, loyalty and how to better their achievements. I believe in the educational value of sport. Not only must sport be given greater importance at school, but the worlds of sport and education must open up to each other more, so that there are closer links between sports and education institutions, and cooperation between sportsmen and -women and teachers for the greatest benefit of our children.

Don’t misunderstand me, my aim is not to increase teaching hours still further, the timetable is already too heavy. It is not to add yet more new subjects to a list which is already too long. On the contrary, to my mind, the aim is to give back to our children time to live, breathe, assimilate what they have been taught.

We need to regain coherence in our educational system. This of course involves a root and branch review of how the school year and curricula are organized, which has become necessary after decades when schools have found themselves confronted with a growing mass of contradictory requirements and tensions and expectations which have been becoming more and more intractable with the increasing fragility of social cohesion. We need to restore coherence within each school subject and between these and society’s expectations, once again find a lodestar for education, set for it principles, goals and simple criteria. This is the first thing we have to do. At the same time we need to set targets, not quantitative but qualitative ones.

Instead of bringing in a brutal selection process for university entrance, which would be a Malthusian solution, we must progressively set higher achievement targets for pupils first at primary school, then at “collège” and then at lycée. No pupils must go into the French “sixième” [UK Year 7, US Sixth Grade] if they have not proved themselves capable of completing the “collège” curriculum. No one must go into “seconde” [UK Year 11, US Eleventh Grade] if they have not proved capable of following the lycée curriculum, and the baccalaureate examination must prove a student’s ability to go on to higher education. This will be a long job involving rebuilding the whole system from primary school to lycée. But it is vital for the future of our young people and so of our country.

Giving each individual pupil the maximum instead of contenting ourselves with giving everyone the minimum – that is the way I should like us from now on to tackle the problem of education and particularly that of primary schools.

This overhaul of our education system can be carried through only with the assistance of everyone involved in educating children. Political will alone will not be enough. This is why I am writing to you.

When I say "everyone involved in educating children" I mean that the goal won’t be achieved solely with the assistance of teachers or solely with that of parents. Everyone has to work together.

For us to succeed you all must work with each other. For fathers, mothers, teachers, judges, police officers, social workers and all those in contact with a child in the fields of sport, the arts and in the voluntary sector, the child’s interests must override every other consideration. Confidence, cooperation, exchanges, a sense of responsibility must be paramount. Everyone must overcome their prejudices or preconceptions to fulfil their duty, which is to prepare the child to become an adult.

Parents, you are the first educators. I know how difficult this role is when unemployment threatens, in step and foster families, or when the father or mother finds him or herself all alone bringing up the children. I know how hard life can be. I want to tell you that you will be supported, that you will be given help whenever you need it to educate your children from the earliest age, and that for me family policy is an integral part of our education policy.

I want to tell you that over the next five years, the right to childcare and a nursery school place will be for me priorities and I am determined to ensure that no children will ever be left to their own devices at the end of the school day so that you can finish your working day without the worry of knowing that your son or your daughter is not being supervised. From now on homework will be done at school in supervised study periods, and for the good pupils from the lowest-income families – who can’t provide their children with a suitable place for study – top-quality boarding schools will be created.

You will be helped in your task. But you have duties vis-à-vis your children. You must set an example. It is your responsibility to ensure your children go to school, to instil in them respect for the law and politeness and check homework is done. If you let them miss school, if you abandon them to their own devices, then it is normal for society to call you to account, for your responsibility to be called into question, for the benefits granted to you to be suspended.

Teachers, you too are entitled to respect. Your role is of primordial importance. You have often studied for a long time. You have to demonstrate intelligence, patience and skill, and be perceptive. I know how demanding the marvellous career of a teacher is, how it forces you to give a lot of yourself, also how difficult and sometimes unrewarding it has become since violence entered schools. I am well aware that your social status and your purchasing power have worsened as your task has become tougher and your working conditions more trying.

The nation owes you more gratitude, better career prospects, a better standard of living and better working conditions. In the past, teachers had a recognized place in society since the Republic was proud of its schools and of those to whom it had entrusted responsibility for them. Primary and secondary school teachers were proud of their profession, proud to serve the Republic and a certain idea of man and of progress. We must reconnect with this pride. In tomorrow’s schools you will be better paid, more highly regarded and, contrary to the egalitarianism which has prevailed for too long, you will earn more, progress faster if you choose to do more and put more effort into your work.

You will be able to choose the teaching methods you think best tailored to your pupils because I think we have to trust teachers, their judgement, because they are the best placed to decide what is right for their pupils. The schools you teach in will have greater autonomy in the way they fulfil the national objectives. All schools will be assessed and resources will be allocated in line with results and the difficulties pupils encounter.

Reskilling for those among you who, after a long time in teaching, feel the need for a career change and to use your skills and knowledge in a different way will be facilitated both inside and outside the public sector. Conversely, things will be made easier for those who, after gaining experience in another field, wish to go into teaching. In national education, as throughout the civil service, the straightjacket constituted by the terms and conditions of service must be loosened to allow the movement of people, ideas and skills.

I wish to make enhancing the status of the teaching profession one of the priorities of my five-year term because it is the corollary of the modernization of schools and overhaul of our education system. But you must, teachers, like parents, set an example. Your behaviour, conduct, your meticulousness, spirit of justice and commitment must be exemplary, as must your ability to make your authority as teacher prevail and your concern to reward merit and punish misdemeanours.

In the school system I want so much to see, in which priority will be given to quality over quantity, where timetables will be lighter, better use made of resources because the autonomy will allow them to be managed more in line with needs, there will be fewer teachers. But this will be the consequence of the school reform and not its aim. And I pledge that the resources thereby released will be reinvested in education and upgrading careers. The aim is to be more efficient, not to ration – and this not only in order to achieve an economic objective, not just so that tomorrow our economy has a well educated and trained workforce, but also and perhaps above all, so that our children may promote the values of civilization so that a certain idea of civilization continues to live in them.

You all, I know, appreciate the importance of the challenge we have to take up. You all understand that the revolution of knowledge taking place before our very eyes allows us no more time to rethink what the word “education” actually means. Some of you realize that, given today’s harsh society and anxiety in the face of a future increasingly perceived as a threat, the world needs a new Renaissance, which will come only thanks to education. It is for us to pick up the thread running from the humanism of the Renaissance to Jules Ferry, via the Enlightenment.

The time for radical reform has come. I call on you to contribute to it. We shall conduct it together. We have already delayed too long./.