A puzzling trend in French engineer school students is to contest the role of companies in their training or even the very training towards an engineering job, as illustrated by the above Le Monde article of last weekend. A former Polytechnique student has even published a book entitled Désertons, calling for deserting the job market. (Paradoxically on sale on Amazon!) These schools are indeed a French peculiarity in that they were initially created to train civil servants for the French State and later expanded to larger cohorts free to join public or private companies. They are radically distinct (and independent) from universities, in their entry mechanism (with a specific competition exam, requiring its own specific preparation public programme), in their training, and in their funding (three times higher per student and mostly issued from other ministries than the Ministry of Education, with minute fees if any). The State support extend to paying a salary to Polytechnique students during their studies, which should on principle be reimbursed when the students do not join a civil service or a public company although it is unclear if anyone has yet been asked to since 2000. (Not due to the 2000 bug!) I thus fail to get the logic of this contestation when the professional purpose of these schools is clear to everyone, when there exist alternatives in the (public) university system, and when the French State is supporting much more intensively this branch of the education system…
Archive for French education ministry
le beurre et l’argent du beurre (have your cake and eat it too)[nicht den Fünfer und das Weggli]
Posted in Books, Kids, University life with tags École Polytechnique, beurre, bug, cake, Centrale Supélec, classes préparatoires, Engineering, ENSAE, enterprises, French education ministry, French politics, grandes écoles, have your cake and eat it too, Le Monde, Mines de Paris, sponsorship, Telecom ParisTech on October 21, 2025 by xi'anJean Zay (1904-1944)
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS, French education ministry, French history, Front populaire, Jean Zay, Musée d'Art Moderne, Musée de l'Homme, supercomputer, Vichy régime, World War II on June 21, 2024 by xi'an
vous avez quatre heures…
Posted in Books, Kids, University life with tags Baccalauréat, French education ministry, high school, lycée, national exam, Nature, philosophy, State, truth on June 18, 2024 by xi'an
95% eeeech….
Posted in Kids, University life with tags Baccalauréat, France Inter, French education ministry, high school mathematics, mathematical education, maths, percentage on December 29, 2022 by xi'an
A question on the French public radio, France Inter, in a weekly high school students quizz:
If a lamp bulb factory has a constant failure rate of 5%, how many bulbs should it at least produce to deliver 1900 operational bulbs?
To which the pair taking part in the quizz, in their final year of high school and hence entering university next year (!), could not answer… Another illustration of the cataclysmic collapse of maths skills in French schools.
Samuel Paty [in memoriam]
Posted in Books, Kids with tags Catrooning for Peace, Charlie Hebdo, collège, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, fanaticism, France, freedom of religion or belief, freedom of speech, French education ministry, history education, humanism, laïcité, political cartoon, rationalism, Samuel Paty, secularism on October 17, 2022 by xi'an
