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PARTISAN REVIEW
and the social integration of regional and social groups. The teaching of
French was a very powerful tool to accomplish this end.
At the same time, a national curriculum also served to promote access
to the "common heritage of humanity." Today, the teaching of philosophy
still is a central aspect of the French secondary school curriculum, but even
in the primary school the teaching of history is conceived both as incul–
cating patriotism and at the same time introducing pupils to the idea of
French democracy-presented by the French Revolution as the birthplace
of human freedom and justice.
Another aim of the primary school curriculum in the national
Republican model was to diffuse a scientific and a secular moral vision of
society. The teaching of science, of geography, and of arithmetic was
explicitly designed to disqualify local knowledge and experience, and to
affirm the primacy of intellectual knowledge. The teaching of morals and
civics, which replaced religious education in schools, was important and
contributed strongly to the creation of a public sphere dominated by the
state where the school had the central place. I think the French system has
gone farthest in the idea that it is not the school that adapts to the child,
but the child that adapts to the school. The child outside the school can be
an individual, can belong to a specific family , a specific religion, or a spe–
cific culture or group. But at school, he or she is a pupil and no difference
should be made on that account.
What is happening to the Republican model today? It has been func–
tioning for more than a century, and it has benefitted from political
consensus by the Right and the Left-if we exempt the short period of the
Vichy regime. This system came under attack-this is characteristic of
most Western countries-at the moment of economic and educational
expansion, the sixties. So political criticism started in the sixties with the
students in the streets, who were protesting against the Republican model
as destroying regional languages and cultures. It was also helped by the
work of sociologists, who started to criticize the school as an instrument
of reproduction of inequalities. This was the period when the elite sec–
ondary system became a mass educational system as well.
In the last ten years the system has been attacked even more than
before, because the criticisms of the sixties and seventies still retained the
idea that the model was strong on national and social integration. During
the last ten years the idea that the system is not even achieving social and
national integration has increasingly surfaced.
How then is this system working for immigrants? What are the new
challenges? We frequently have debated the idea that the national
Republican model managed to integrate populations that were European
or had been integrated into European culture by colonization, and that the
