Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 15, 2001:

His Excellency Claude Allègre
Former Minister of National Education, Research
And Technology, France

  “Educational Reform in the U.S. and Europe”

       Thank you, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. I just want to give you a few ideas about the comparative problems we have in Europe, in general, and France, in particular, and maybe slightly in the United States.  Of course, on the last point I will be more cautious for obvious reasons but one of them is for diplomatic reasons since I understand there’s a big discussion today going on about reform and I don’t want tobe interfering with a foreign country’s policy.

      I just want first to [discuss] probably, some of the prejudices you have.  When I travel in the United States everybody says, “Oh, the beautiful education system you have in Europe.  Oh, so poor our education system we have here.  Oh, if we could only imitate that.”  I think the situation is not like that today.  The situation of European education has been falling down continuously for the last twenty years.  This is simple.  We have an evaluation for the world now every year on the principal subjects, mathematics, physics, etc. and if you look at the position on those evaluations, Europeans, not only France, are falling down. For example, France used to be very good in mathematics; now we are number seven.  The tope [countries] are Korea, Singapore and India now.  Everybody believes we will be safe because we have a high education.  That’s not true anymore.  First point.  If we don’t make our education a big boom then we will be in big trouble, because we represent, for France, one percent of the world’s population.  If we don’t do as we have done in the past, an exceptionally good education, then we will lose many of our positions in the world.  So this is the first point.

      The second point is, you said American schools are bad.  I also wish to challenge this point. First of all, and maybe Americans don’t appreciate it enough, you have by far the best universities in the world.  By far—which means there’s no comparison, except maybe one or two in Europe on the quality of the American universities.  The university, to me, in the United States, is the basis of the prosperity of the United States.  A couple of years ago, you read in the newspapers that the Japanese are going to take over in electronics, computers, everything.  Today, nobody speaks anymore about the competition of the Japanese. Why? Because people, some students at Stanford, some others at MIT, have developed a new system, new technology, new inventions and know that everything that is Silicon Valley is a product of Stanford.  The Route 128 is a pure product of MIT and Harvard.  So, the universities in this country are really at heart extremely important.

      Those universities have several characteristics. First of all, to select the student, each of them with different criteria.  That means if you’re good maybe you will not fit at Harvard, but maybe you will fit at MIT.  This is a big diversity. Cal Tech doesn’t admit the same people as Stanford, and so forth.  So, this is the base of diversity.  You drive in the best place, the best people whatsoever, their specialty.  This is a very important point.

      In Europe, we have a tendency to believe, especially in France, that you are the true, and this is absurd, of course, he’s not the true, and you decide to select for mathematics or some other on a path from Latin, and nothing else.  But you have some people who are as good in natural science as in mathematics and they are as valuable.  But in the French system, they have a very hard time to do it.  So diversity is a very important point. 

      But linked with that, because your secondary schools are not, I would say, on average terrific, you have one advantage—your children don’t get that tired.  In fact, when they get out of the secondary schools they are still very fresh.  Our students get tired by overcrowding, by too many hours, too many programs, and so forth.  Your people come into the university and they are eager to learn and so they have a lot of energy.  Your program, for example, in the universities is remarkable.  It’s more diverse.  Many times in Europe, we say that the Americans are specialized. By far they are less specialized than in Europe.  In France, you choose at entrance to a university philosophy, and you do only philosophy, or you do mathematics.  Here you are obliged to take six or seven different things.  In fact, many science students take some literature in their freshman year.  So, this is the basis of your education and I think you don’t have to worry until you spend enough money because you pay for it.  You have to realize that you pay on average per capita 3.5 times more than we pay in Europe on the university.  So you put an enormous amount of money on the university, and comparably you pay for less in the high schools than we pay in Europe.  Those things have to be known.  Your system is based on that. 

      Why do we have a problem in Europe?  The problem in Europe can be said in numbers very easily.  In a French university these are the numbers: between 1953 and today, the number of students has increased from 100,000 to two million.  The number of people teaching in universities was something like 5,000; there are now 1000,000.  So this is the [biggest] increase you can imagine.  Comparatively, in a secondary school you have also a fantastic growth, which means that in the past the French system was conceived as an elite system—you have a selection and only a small percentage of people are in the secondary schools and then fewer in the universities.  Now it’s becoming a broad-based education and, of course, you cannot pass from one system to another if you don’t change the structure.  We have not changed the structure.  The teachers, for example, still believe they are in an elite education system.  They are no longer in an elite education system.  They have to take care of everybody who comes, and so this creates an enormous problem and this is a basis for tension.  In Europe, you know, we have this tension.  France, Germany have reacted quicker than the others, but the result is that we don’t have any more real top universities, neither in France or in Germany.  We have good universities, but we have nothing compared to Harvard or to Berkeley, or MIT.  The UK has been resistant, but now they are in the flow.  They are in the flow because fifteen years ago they had 12 percent of an age generation in the universities.  France and Germany are 50 percent, now even more-and U.S. is 60 percent-and now, you know, the people in the UK are going to 35 percent.  So we’re obliged to create those polytechnic institutes to eventually now become two universities and so forth. 

      Some other results which are disaster for Europe is research, because a university is not just a place where you teach.  A modern university, an American university, is a place where you do research, where you get the student on the latest research so they can be productive immediately, and now it is the place where you create startup and new companies and new little things.  This is what a university is, and if you have not research linked with education and linked with the creation of business, you have a real problem.  So in Europe this is our lack, because what happens is we have too many researchers.  We have, for example, 2.5 more researchers in France and Germany than in the United States.  So, the result is, that each researcher doesn’t have enough money to do his [work].  So the people, the researcher, complains he has not enough money.  It’s true, but it is because there are too many.  And so in Europe, now, we are incapable, absolutely incapable—except the UK still, but for how long I don’t know—and in Holland to speak about “centers of excellence”. The recent European Commissioner said we have to do centers of excellence in Europe.  I said, “Yes.  How do you do that?”  If immediately you’d said, “We will do a center of excellence in Bordeaux,” immediately Marseilles or Toulouse, everybody would say, “Well , I am the center of excellence.”  And even so, if you do that you have some people who would say, “Why do you care about excellence?  We should be equal to everybody.”  So this is a situation which is extremely bad, and I don’t know how we can reverse this trend.

      The point [about] secondary school education is that the secondary schools have not been reformed enough.  We are getting people aware of science.  We have a drop in people coming out of the secondary schools over the last five years: 32 percent are not doing science.  So we have a drop in the science students, because they were educated, they don’t like science, and that the end of that.  We have a huge increase in the university of the number of people in psychology, sociology and physical education, gymnastics.  This is a big increase, and the fact that our national team won the soccer championship was a disaster of this issue.  Everybody wants to go into this field.  So we have to reform the secondary schools, but it’s very difficult because the teachers don’t want to move.

      The second point is that the secondary schools and the primary schools—but less the primary schools—are managed by the central operation.  In other words, when I was Minister of Education, I had under me 1.2 million people, and I tried to decentralize as much as possible.  In fact, I was reading the debate in the American newspaper today, and I think you are exactly on opposite side as we are.  You have decentralized system for management, which is good, because for management you should be decentralized.  But you also decentralized everything.  Therefore, you don’t have any national standards.  I think the equilibrium is to have decentralized management and national standards.  I am not too worried about U.S. education, frankly speaking, because I believe that your people are taking the problem seriously.  If they make some national standard, not very strong, if they educate the people with the same wisdom that has been  in the past, I think they can do well.  You just have to pay a little more to secondary school teachers, who are underpaid, in my opinion, in this country, but if they do that it would be okay.

      In Europe, I am not so optimistic.  Of course, our education, basically the primary schools, is still good, and they create the basis of the secondary schools that are not bad.  I said they are degrading, but they are not bad.  So I think we will maintain the problem for a while, but we will not improve and we have to improve to maintain our position.  I believe that in all of those systems the key word is excellence.  There was an article a couple of weeks ago in Times magazine which I support completely.  They were saying that the best golf player is Tiger Woods, and the two best players are two American-Africans, and this girl, Oprah Winfrey who is very successful, [all these things] are going to drive this community more than many [other] plans.  I believe this is true for everything.  In fact, in France the energy is in the suburbs.  But those people, what they make to become a musician or they become professional soccer players, all of the big stars came from there.  If we can drag them a little to do business or to do science, they will be as successful, except we have not to do a uniform education.

      So my point is decentralization, diversity, and, at the same time national standards.  Meaning what?  Meaning for certain numbers of things we have to have national standards but, on the lower lever, we have to let the professor and the teacher to do it their way to reach the national standard…not [push] them away.  I feel that, after all, many of the children have many talents.  More than you believe.  But those talents sometimes are appreciated at one age, some at other ages, some in music, some in mathematics.  The goal of the teacher is to discover in each child what his talent is.  But if you impose on the teacher a program which is extremely tied up he will not do that.  He will not have time to do that.

      I think we share two facts.  In the U.S., as well as in France, the nursery schools are beautiful. They are the best by far.  In fact, I had one of my kids in a nursery school her as well as in France and my mother was one of the directors of the nursery school who made the French reform forty years ago.  So I say they’re good.  The primary schools are not that bad in the U.S., unlike what you read in the newspaper.  In France, I think, they are sill solid.  But we have, from our point of view, to make big progress in the universities, but we must now be able to raise the center of excellence, and I don’t know how to do this, really.  This is a very difficult thing.

    Here, you probably have to deal with a national standard.  But again, don’t lose the diversity and don’t lose the initiative.  If we don’t do that, I am very attached personally to what wins in public service.  We pay taxes, and those taxes should go somewhere.  Some people say they go to the army.  I don’t think the army is the only place where the taxes should go.  So the state should provide to its citizens a certain number of things.  An education is one of the things that the state has to provide, because education in the end is the most important thing in life.  If you give equal opportunity to the kids then you make a nation, not only because [morally] it’s better to give equal opportunity and justice and so forth, but also because if you draft all of the good people the nation will be even stronger.  So education is important.  But if the public service is not capable to do that, then I’m sure private initiative is going to take the education service. 

    I will give you a number you won’t believe.  Probably you don’t know. In the U.S. you have only 15 percent of private schools for higher education; in France we already have 25 percent.  You have a system, and we have a system in Europe—we go from Germany with four percent, U.K is with seven percent—to Holland with 75 percent of private schools in exactly the system I understand you President wants to propagate.  In other words, they are private schools, but the children come with a check given by the government.  So they are private schools but paid by the state, more or less.  Only the rich people have the money; the others are directly paid by the government.  I’m afraid this system is going to spread if the public service is not capable of doing that. 

    I will end with a question mar.  If we’re going this way then it would be a change in a French republic.  It will be a completely different regime.  Because this is one of the bases of our republic, which was built after the Revolution.  Yes, the state provides a certain number of things—the judges, the police, the education, and the army.  If we start having private things—now we have too much, the state was owning a car company and so forth.  This was very crazy in my view, but this is going on.  But education, I think, if you go in a private sector there is a big danger then that equal opportunity will go, and then if the state doesn’t give equal opportunity, it would be different regime.  I am not going to judge what it will be, but it will be a serious question.  This is why I have been very deeply concerned by this reform.  Unfortunately, I get in trouble with the secondary school teachers, but okay, somebody else will do it.