The story about the French education minister's plans to improve young people's level of English level has even reached the USA. The San Francisco Chronicle has quite a long article summarising various English and French news reports. Extract:
This might come as something of a surprise to the members of the august Académie Française and to the rest of their countrymen or, more precisely, to their children, but in this back-to-school-season that is known as "la rentrée" in France, French education minister Xavier Darcos has two words of advice: Learn English.
If that's a message that makes lovers of the language of Corneille and Molière cringe, it's also a wake-up call to face a new-world reality Darcos has recognized and to which his proposed, learn-English emphasis in France's nationally supervised education policy seeks to address. There was a time, of course, when French was the main language of diplomacy and of the world's educated and cultured elites; 19th-century Russian aristocrats, for example, often were likely to speak, read and write French better than they could the lingo of Pushkin's poems.
Of course, only time will tell but the response from the Association des Professeurs de Langue Vivante has been sceptical to say the least. And as for the unions :
One teachers' union in France has dismissed Darcos's proposal. "The education minister is becoming more and more the minister of after-school time," the union sniffed, hinting that Darcos has no business telling students or teachers how to use after-class hours that are normally devoted to elective extracurricular activities. Another union argued that teachers who work hard at their jobs "cannot pile on additional hours" of teaching beyond regularly scheduled class time without such extra workloads negatively affecting their job-performance quality.
C'est mal parti, as they say in France!
