The cream float which is gently retrieved

Film, it is the time of "School for all". Today released the film of Eric Rochant, which has precisely this title. Jahwad, 38 years, including four past to redouble its classes, returns to College (in the skin of a prof) to escape the police. In "The indomitable", released in June, Jacques Gamblin was a forty years unemployed worker who regains its confidence from its tray. But in real life, it is any different. Adults returning to school are those who have succeeded in their youth. This apparent banality is an economic and social drama major. Because in a world where everything is more quickly, should increasingly learn throughout life. A century ago, there was a job forever. Today, half of assets changed of activity or service in the past five years. Change to all floors: the recurring task gives way to the relative autonomy, those of the "back office" are pumped to the "front office" and the service to the customer, the management must encourage instead of frame. And adaptation to these incessant changes course through training.

But the permanent training is wrong in France, despite annual expenditures of more than 20 billion euros. She went first to the better trained. This is what clearly showed a survey conducted in 2000 by the Institute of statistics and the Centre for studies and research on qualifications: graduates of the University were three times more numerous than the sans-diplômes to be trained in the past year and there is no reason to think that the reality has changed since. It is socially unfair: the lift benefits to those who are already on the third floor! In a recent report carried out at the request of the Chamber of commerce of Paris, Pierre Cahuc and André Zylberberg, economists are right to denounce a system which "benefits mainly to employees the best trained and best paid initially, whose courses are funded by less well paid than they employees." And it is economically inefficient: the OECD work, with the characteristic of not having been challenged, show that continuing education has a particularly high performance that initial training is low.

Why has this ineffective injustice In a study on the subject, Anne - Lise Aucouturier, Dares (statistical service of the Ministry of Social Affairs), believes that "the absence of initial training is combined with professional situations which training proposals are absent. In other words, companies prefer spoil their frameworks. In three-quarters of the cases, are employers that determine the required training and their beneficiaries. But human resources officials describe a more nuanced reality. The low-skilled workers are also those who have the least desire to training. Because they are less informed, less aware also that it can provide. And especially because they do not want to return to school. Experts trying to analyze training Springs like little explanation of the "bad school memories". The problem is not there. School, it necessarily bored a little, it is also the friends and some meet even elected officials of their heart. The problem is a French specificity: it out more often school on failure. And therefore tends to dismiss, even twenty years later.

From kindergarten to University, the French school functions as a giant machine to skim. Small technical point: skimming is to put milk in a large pan (which can rotate to go faster). The cream float which is gently retrieved. The rest flows. It is the French school system. It seemed logical a century ago, when it was to select a small elite in leaving the mass go to fields or the factory knowing read a ballot. It is dramatic in the era of the knowledge society.

This obsession of skimming is reflected in a myriad of anecdotes. The Director of nursery school in a beautiful Parisian neighbourhood attracting the attention of the parents on the non-negligible proportion of its former students entered at the ENA. This teacher summoning the parents of a boy of three and a half years for their note disturbing deficiencies in mathematics. These class councils where it detects weaknesses of a student might cause his eviction from the school not its forces to highlight so that he can succeed in life.

More generally, the mania of skimming reads in alarming global figures. young 150,000 emerge each year in the school system without any qualifications: they sank very early. A student on two out of the University without a diploma. It is as if the educational machine had no other purpose than to select the best tirelessly without worrying about other. It is impossible to otherwise understand two French specifics. The first is the very high rate of repetition, typical phase of skimming. According to the indicators of Education published last month by the OECD, 38 of 15-year-old students say have redoubled to at least a class France, three times more than the average for developed countries (13)! The second is what André Antibi calls "macabre constant". After mouliné millions of notes, this mathematician of Toulouse always reaches the same conclusion: in a French class, there is always one-third of pupils, one third of resources and one third of bad. This constant is not found in other countries. CQFD: French note is manufactured to sort and not to evaluate.

Cannot qualify for the school system, many French don't want therefore to return. Indeed, the contrary would be a masochism! Training is vital. It is essential that employers try to convince their employees. The famous "employability" is here. And throughout the school, from kindergarten to higher education, will have to change the software: to move the selection to the second plan of priorities. The challenge is much greater than all those who work in school or reflect on it, and teachers from kindergarten to the Minister through the expert, the more difficult to understand where is the problem. For an obvious reason: cream, it is them.