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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (29481)	5/13/2002 4:02:35 PM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

public education is a very good thing. Surely there is more to the story than that. (This refers to my remark about what a disaster Claude Allègre was as French ministère de l'éducation) It's less complicated and conspiratorial and more humorous than you think. Allègre was (and presumably still is) a good friend of Lionel Jospin, dating to their university days. When Chirac called for early elections for the parliament (as was his right; it's article 12 of the constitution), this was a disaster for the right, and the socialists came to power. Jospin appointed his friend Allègre as education minister. I myself was surprised that someone raised in France could have handled the situation so un diplomatically, because right away Allègre proposed sweeping reorganizations to address what are still some real problems with the French educational system, particularly as you progress from middle school through university level, it gets monotonically worse. There really is a problem with the system being a filter rather than a pump. You simply cannot do something like this when things are controlled by labor unions, and I don't even think a sweeping reform was a good idea in the first place. These kinds of things involving something as important as public education have to be done gradually with agreement from all parties involved, and not dictated from là-haut. As one can expect, there were strikes and demonstrations, and in the end Allègre resigned, and that was the end of it. Not a single reform got done as far as I know. Chirac is being much more circumspect with his appointments. You'll note he chose Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a moderate, and not Nicolas Sarkozy for prime minister; Sarkozy will be ministère de l'intérieur, a role he's much more suited for in any case.