11.5 The school system and the grandes écoles — Epoché
What you will be able to do Explain the place of the baccalauréat in French life: the end of secondary school, a national ritual, and the key to higher education. Understand the two tracks of French higher education: the open universities and the selective grandes écoles , most often reached by classes préparatoires and competitive examinations. Recognise the names of the great schools that train the French elite, and the debate about merit and inequality that surrounds them. Talk about exams and results with the right words: la mention , l'oral , la sélection . Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English David veut la bourse. [1] David wants the scholarship. David est allé à la campagne pour passer Noël en famille. [2] David went to spend Christmas time with his family in the countryside. Mon écrit est meilleur que mon oral. [3] My writing is better than my speaking. Appelez le médecin pour qu'il confirme le rendez-vous. [4] Call the doctor so that he confirms the appointment. En français, je suis meilleure à l’écrit qu’à l’oral. [5] I'm better at writing French than speaking it. Prerequisites : 11.4 — this lesson follows 11.4 Background . You learned the school vocabulary in 5.8 Vocabulary and read about the structure of the system in 7.12 Reading ; this lesson goes from the end of the lycée to the top of the system. The baccalaureate At about eighteen, French pupils take the baccalauréat , or le bac , the national examination that ends secondary school and opens the way to higher education. It is a national event: newspapers publish the philosophy questions on the morning of the exam, as you saw in 5.20 Vocabulary , and the results, posted in July, are celebrated or mourned in every family. About eighty per cent of each generation now holds the bac , against a few per cent a century ago, and the pass rate is around ninety per cent. Good candidates obtain a mention , a distinction: assez bien , bien or très bien . There are in fact three kinds of bac . The general one, the most common, leads mostly to universities and classes préparatoires . The technological one prepares for short technical courses in higher education. The vocational one, created in 1985, trains for a trade and leads more often directly to work. The first choice is made at about fifteen, at the end of the collège , between the general and technological lycée and the vocational one; the choice between the general and the technological bac follows a year later. The first choice weighs heavily on later chances; families and teachers know it, which is why the orientation decision at that age is one of the most anxious moments of a French school career. A reform in 2021 changed the exam: part of the mark now comes from work during the year, pupils choose specialities, and every candidate takes an oral examination, le grand oral , in which they present and defend a question before a jury. Since 2018 applications to higher education go through a national website, Parcoursup, which many families find stressful. Two kinds of higher education The universities are public, and their fees are low, set by the state. In principle, any holder of the bac may enrol, and for a long time there was no selection at entry; many students fail or drop out in the first year. The universities give most of the country's degrees and carry out much of its public research, alongside national research bodies such as the CNRS. The grandes écoles are smaller and highly selective. The traditional route is two years of classes préparatoires , intensive courses in a lycée , followed by a concours , a competitive examination with written papers and orals, where only a fixed number of places is available. The best known are the École normale supérieure , which trains researchers and teachers, the École polytechnique , an engineering school under military status, HEC for business, and Sciences Po for politics, which admits students straight after the bac . For more than seventy years the École nationale d'administration trained senior civil servants and many presidents and ministers; it was replaced in 2022 by a new institute, after criticism that it produced a closed elite. Merit and inequality The system is built on an ideal of the Republic: the concours is anonymous and the same for all, so that places go to merit, not to birth. Yet study after study shows that the children of teachers, executives and professionals are far more likely to reach the grandes écoles than the children of workers. In 1964 the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron called the successful students les héritiers , the heirs, of a culture that the school rewards without teaching it. The debate continues, and many schools now run programmes to recruit students from poor districts, or reserve places for grant holders, in the hope that the elite of tomorrow will look more like the country it serves. Terms Eight words of exams and schools, each with a corpus example. Word Meaning Notes le baccalauréat fr baccalaureate, school-leaving exam Gender / part of speech masculine noun How English differs Usually le bac ; not a university degree, as the English word suggests. Je viens d'avoir mon bac. [6] I just graduated from high school. la mention fr distinction (on a result); mention Gender / part of speech feminine noun How English differs avoir son bac avec mention , with a distinction. Il est diplômé de Cambridge avec mention. [7] He graduated from Cambridge with honors. l'oral fr oral exam Gender / part of speech masculine noun How English differs A noun in French: passer un oral ; the written exam is l'écrit . J'ai un oral demain. [8] Tomorrow I have an oral test. l'élite fr the elite Gender / part of speech feminine noun How English differs Feminine; une école d'élite . Tu fais maintenant partie de l'élite. [9] You are now among the elite. la sélection fr selection Gender / part of speech feminin