While I was presiding over the University Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, my friend the philosopher Guy Coq, who had preceded me to the vice-presidency of the UNEF, engaged in the defense of secularism and well aware of the evolution of the educational system, had asked me if we could host in the prestigious premises of the Sorbonne the colloquium he was organizing on educational stakes... I accepted all the more willingly as I had some ideas to assert in this field, and that I was working for a permanent rapprochement of secondary education with the university. I pass over the difficulties encountered to obtain an amphitheater, and I come immediately to my welcome speech. I cannot say more, having had to return to my presidential office to deal with the most urgent affairs of the day...

The work is unavailable in bookstores, but libraries still offer it. You can read this introduction.

Here is the complete text of my address:

Colloquium Educational stakes, social stakes

Opening address by Henri BEHAR

On behalf of the University Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, I have the pleasure of opening the Colloquium Educational stakes, social stakes, bringing together the reflection groups from the journals — School and Society - Today's Politics - Present Reason — Intervention — Project — Spirit.
If the University I represent has wished to be a full partner of these meetings, and not limit itself to offering its premises, it is because it seemed necessary to us to make known the point of view of an autonomous Institution, beyond the individual positions we may have on the question. When I say "we", I speak of the Executive Board of the University, constituted by elected representatives of the three categories composing the establishment: Students, Teachers, Staff. Certainly, they are numerous those who reflect or write on the subject gathering us today, they even make a lot of noise, if not a lot of harm, by caricaturing the system in order to better pass ideas whose common point is often the return to a centenary School, mythified in its splendid isolation. There are even prestigious institutions like, very recently, the Collège de France, which enunciate solutions considered as common sense, while emphasizing the contradictory objectives of French society regarding its school. As interesting as this report addressed to the President of the Republic may be, it presents two defects, major in my eyes:

1. It does not define in any way the public of the School, does not appreciate either its past or its future;
2. It does not rest on any current practice of pedagogy, of the teacher-student relationship.

This is why, it seems to me, our colloquium should engage a completely different debate, starting from a completely different problematic, making the necessary part to individuals as much as to systems.
For it is only too easy to elaborate proposals, if one sets aside the men who will have to apply them, the young people who should benefit from them. Can we reason, in this matter, without taking into account a milieu whose heart is on the left, like everyone else, but whose pedagogical ideas are on the right, and whose feet remain immutably fixed in the same place? Above all, let's not disturb habits, let's not touch "acquired advantages". What does it matter that everything moves around us, we will remain there like witness hills, to mark our position in a desert of boredom! say these dear colleagues. And their spokespersons engage in marginal criticisms of power, leaving the right to pocket the stakes. What would be, in these conditions, the major theme of our work? First of all, an effort of clarification of vocabulary, and of the realities it represents. Unity of the educational system? Yes, but to favor the diversity of beings and thoughts, to support the autonomy of establishments. Under what conditions can this unity be realized as long as we have, in fact, a dualistic system inherited from the Empire. Grandes Écoles on one side, Universities on the other, this is enough to polarize all tropisms, from kindergarten. I am not afraid to say: the left has lost the historical opportunity to bring the two ensembles closer by keeping what is best in each of them because it has not thought Unity and because, quite simply, we also have good comrades from the Grandes Écoles, who are no less socialist than we are! Democratization? no doubt. But what does this mana word mean in our time, in each order of teaching? How should this translate when some, from culturally favored backgrounds, have courses reinforced by multiple tutors, while others see the gap widen throughout compulsory schooling? Should one cling to fetishism, when one knows that at the University, the percentage of workers' sons decreases! Instead of the reigning miserabilism, would it not be better to demand university rights allowing institutions to function decently, without always holding out the begging bowl, it is up to them to extend collective aid to really disadvantaged categories of students, beyond the small number of scholarship holders. Take from the rich to give to the poor, I know no other distributive justice.
Quality? Who has ever said the contrary? It is the very type of false debate that we are beaten over the ears with, when one wants to make us believe that quality passes through the a priori selection of students, when one thinks that the most graded teachers must abandon the first cycle, at college as at university. We will have quality as soon as we orient students according to their tastes and capacities, at each stage of their curriculum, as soon as we have eliminated selection by failure or by 'natural evaporation'.
It is not because there is a numerus clausus at the entrance of medical studies that French doctors are good. It is not because there is a numerus clausus that there is no unemployment in the profession since currently 2000 doctors cannot find employment.
After having given meaning to the words of the tribe, it will be necessary to define contents and not be content with incantations. Interdisciplinarity one says? yes, but how to bring together the different disciplines on concrete objects, adapted to the age of the students? We all know that we have much to learn from the meeting, on the same ground, of historians, philosophers, literary people, sociologists and specialists in educational sciences. But how to go beyond the juxtaposition of disciplines to achieve a multidisciplinary reflection and practice, this is what the colloquium will have to specify: Likewise it will be appropriate to ensure fundamental teaching in the concrete! What is the use of the supremacy of pure mathematics, when the user does not know how to make the difference between a treasury and a budget? The programs of the 1st university cycles reformed from 1984 should, in this case, bring us precise elements of reflection. On this subject, it would be appropriate to consider the insertion of new techniques in basic programs. For a literary university like ours, which has the concern to train its students in computer science, the debate is not closed. Should we simply teach them to use the computer tool in the discipline that is theirs, or teach them computer science as an autonomous discipline? Can we moreover treat all this without considering the question of reference cultures? Popular culture, learned culture, school culture: how to make them communicate with each other; how to teach them, form and content, without establishing an imbecile hierarchy?
Much has been discussed and confronted regarding professionalization, encouraged by the law of January 6, 84, already programmed by that of 1968, often going astray. What knowledge does the school institution have of the professional future of young people, of socio-economic environments? Will the intervention of professionals in teaching be enough to bring these two worlds closer? Can we count on the internships, however well organized they are, of students to establish the indispensable junction? Should not the teachers themselves insert themselves into the professional fabric? How far should this approach go? In truth, perhaps too much is asked of teachers, without giving them the necessary instruments of knowledge, both for what concerns economic environments and for the nature of taught publics and for teaching rhythms. The advantage of our profession is that we are always in a learning situation. For more than 10 years, Paris III has organized recycling courses for teachers, from kindergarten to university, so as to permanently update knowledge and practices: this by opening pedagogy not only on complementary disciplines of classical training, but also by innovating through dramatic play, body expression etc. and by equipping itself with means of diffusion of contemporary knowledge: computer science, audio-visual, distance learning. But the quiet revolution of the university, the one that does not make splashes, is its opening to new publics, to new age groups. Beyond the initial training of 18-25 year olds, we have, in mass, a public that resumes its studies after a more or less long interruption, those who enter the University through the ESEU path, retirees frequenting the Open University and, latest innovation, those who having no diploma, not even the baccalaureate, but benefiting from a certain social practice, come to register for the D.H.E.P.S. (Diploma of Higher Studies in Social Practice).
Evoking the opening of the University, I cannot do less than mention the important number of foreign students (more than a quarter at Paris III) for whom we wish to pass agreements of integral reciprocity with their original Establishments, which should allow our students to acquire training at Berkeley as at the University of Montreal, without costing them the astronomical price of American training.
To conclude on a new opening, I will say that the University President that I am believes a lot in the notion of contract, engaging equally the Establishment and the Ministry of National Education or, at another level, the Student and the teaching team. But I am convinced that this can no longer be followed, or even piloted, from a central administration which, it is said, is the biggest company in the world, after the Red Army. Perhaps we must have the courage to say that we will have resolved nothing of the educational and social stakes as long as their management has not been brought back to a more human scale, that of the region - including for Paris. Such is the feeling of an old Jacobin after three and a half years of experience at the head of the University.