1955 - The French Education System in the Fourth Republic

The ideas of the Popular Front government and the Resistance concerning educational reform were taken up in 1944 by the provisional government of the ‘Free French’, whose plan d’Alger represented a preliminary draft for the reform of the French education system. In the same year, on the basis of these recommendations, the government set up a commission which was initially coordinated by the physicist Paul Langevin then, after his death, by the psychologist Henri Wallon. In 1947, the commission issued a comprehensive plan for the reform of the French education system. The proposals called for an école unique for all pupils from the age of six to eighteen, which latter was to be the new legal school leaving age, and placed considerable emphasis on history and civic education for all stages of schooling. A phase of elementary education was to be followed by an orientation stage for pupils aged eleven to fifteen, with core subjects in which all pupils were to be taught together and a system of elective subjects; this phase was to prepare pupils for their subsequent education and assist in decision-making on its future course. The third phase of education was to give pupils a choice between either embarking upon an apprenticeship, undertaking more theoretically grounded vocational training, or choosing to pursue academic education. The introduction of comprehensive schooling was to be accompanied by reforms to teacher training; trainee teachers were to embark on their courses after their university entrance examinations and undergo a combination of practical and theoretical training offered at a teacher training college (école normale) and at university.
The polarisation of political factions during the Fourth Republic, which caused the breakdown of the initial unity among the Resistance movement, made it impossible to implement the reform project drawn up by the Langevin-Wallon Commission; it was the education policymakers of the Fifth Republic who were to put its plans for structural modernisation into practice.

Steffen Sammler
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