A Testimony: Who Is Frédéric Térence?
Today, I am an old, retired teacher from the disastrous French public education system, yet I am still deeply committed to seeing every child and every human being flourish.
Let me say that straight away.
I am, in fact, what is commonly called a "boomer," born in the aftermath of the Second World War into a poor family in the mining region of northern France. From a very young age, I experienced school as a trauma and responded to it by rejecting it. I was therefore a "bad student" until a kind and caring teacher, in a class for pupils completing their primary education, wondered why I had not gone on to sixième (the first year of secondary school in France, which at that time not all children had access to) and persuaded my parents to have higher professional ambitions for me than an apprenticeship in baking or charcuterie.
To put it bluntly from the start: that's how I managed to benefit from a so-called "social elevator." What a droll expression! Back then it was one of those "normal schools for primary teachers" that trained the "Black Hussars of the Republic," so dear to Jules Ferry — that supreme republican icon who still believed in the existence of "inferior races." Didn't he declare in Parliament in 1885: "The superior races have a right over the inferior races, because they have a duty toward them. They have the duty to civilise the inferior races"?
Today no one talks about any "social elevator" anymore. And if one still existed, it would only serve the basements of a society that is as hypocritical as it is ruthless.
So after the third year, having passed the famous entrance exam to the "normal school for primary teachers," I was about to become a pure product of that miserable French National Education system, in which I survived for more than 42 years, counting both training and actual teaching.
Moderately ambitious and, above all, cautious, I quickly discovered at my own expense how relentless social determinism really is — unless you can suppress your sensitivity and be cynical enough to cultivate a properly respectable form of careerism. What some people ("the best among us") regard as a weakness.
So I contented myself with doing this little civil-servant teacher job.
In September 1967, having barely reached the age of civil majority in the French Republic (21 at the time), I found myself in charge of several groups of 30 to 40 children and adolescents, sons and daughters of miner-workers, in one of those educational barracks called secondary schools, right in the heart of what was still mining country — the land of the "black faces" so dear to Zola.
Inaugurated as a "CEG master = teacher" (Collège d'Enseignement Général — but not master of my own destiny!), my "status" only evolved much later when I managed to change "corps" (administrative, of course!) and became a "certified" teacher (French Standard!). At the time I was authorised to teach 24 hours a week to these kids of the poor and the dominated, just as I myself had been. My skills had to be broad: French (spelling, grammar, a bit of literature), history, geography, and occasionally drawing or music (because I didn't like sport!).
Very quickly I felt uncomfortable in this grim role. So much so that in May 1968, when the last French revolution broke out… I was on sick leave and joined the general strike overnight. Yes, I later had the privilege of witnessing the political collapse of the illustrious General de Gaulle, who died not long afterwards…
After fleeing for three years to Morocco, and little convinced by the charms of life as a cultural neo-colonial supposedly working as a "cooperant" in Marshal Lyautey's favourite country, I managed to get myself posted to Paris in another educational barrack : a secondary school that is still standing today. And all I could think about was leaving again to pursue a "career abroad" — something I ultimately never managed to bring myself to do.
Having thus definitively given up on the idea of running an Alliance Française in Latin America — a lucrative, exotic and rather phoney escape route the system was offering me on the strength of the skills I had acquired in FLE (French as a Foreign Language) — I resolved to teach what I actually loved, the French language, for 22 years, mainly to foreign children and adolescents who were then called "newly arrived non-French speakers", in so-called "reception classes" (a nice little euphemism) in Paris. I had said yes when the headmistress of the secondary school where I was teaching at the time approached me with: "You who've done Morocco — there's a small class of foreigners, would that interest you?"
These "foreigners" were inevitably marginalised, just as I myself became in the school context. Yet through their seriousness, their desire to learn and their sheer joy of living, they gave me the energy and the drive to stick it out in that mediocre institution with its correspondingly mediocre results, as the specialised PISA studies regularly point out. An institution that mistreats the very word "education", but which nonetheless achieves its ends, since virtually all these young people ended up conforming to the existing unjust social order — thus accomplishing, in that sense, a "successful integration".
Yet it was during that period, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, that I was genuinely happy in this institution. In an article I wrote for an alternative educational journal, "Learning French… and Then What?", I describe how, over twelve years, I was able to combine the teaching of French to these "children of migrants" with an audiovisual production for television: a mini-series broadcast in the youth programmes of a public-service channel under the generic title What's Your Country?. More information and the chance to watch the four short films (Japan, Morocco, Tibet, China) can be found here.
That fragile period of happiness was followed by ten much harder years in a school classified as "sensitive". It remained fascinating, but year after year it became increasingly exhausting — as described in the article mentioned above.
And by the early 2000s, I had come to the conclusion that it was no longer possible for me to continue teaching in this type of class. The administration was doing whatever it pleased, sending complete beginners into already overcrowded classes at any point in the school year. The disparity in French learning levels was becoming unmanageable.
Excerpt from Learning French… and Then What ? (Apprendre le français et après ?)
It was thus becoming heavier and heavier, more and more complex. The administration couldn't care less. While the education authority's only concern was to place these "newly arrived" students somewhere in an existing reception class, I one day pointed out to the management of this "sensitive" middle school that overloading the class, imposing complete beginners at any point in the year, was no longer simply asking me to master differentiation and complexity — it was undermining my work and bordering on the absurd. They then tried to reassure me: I was free to judge independently what I was able to do and stick to that.
The full article is available below.
And I remember that headmistress who told me, word for word:
"Whatever you can't do, just don't do it!"
I then left her office with the firm intention of requesting a transfer to a high school for the two years I still had left to teach before I could retire. It was a very difficult period because I felt I could not bring myself to short-change the learning of the students I saw every morning. I can still see them waiting for me quietly from 8 a.m. in the middle-school courtyard and rewarding me with their smiles. They were aware that I was doing everything possible for them and let me know it. The text mentioned earlier precisely describes the enormous investment I imposed on myself so that they would at least get by and not join the sad ranks of "school failure."
It should be noted that after this deep disagreement with my "hierarchical superior," the academic authorities opted for a new reception system for this type of student, which was subsequently adopted and implemented by all the academies. Gone were the "adaptation classes," "non-French-speaking" and then "reception" classes that I had known. Armed with the newspeak of which they are so fond, they found a suitable designation for the system that turned these young foreigners into ordinary students immediately assigned to "normal" classes. I quote:
"In order to allow better visibility of the overall organization, a generic name for all specific structures for the schooling of newly arrived allophone students is adopted: pedagogical unit for newly arrived allophone students, .(Unité Pédagogique pour élèves Allophones Arrivants UP2A )"
Isn't that wonderful? For those who want to go further, as they say, here is the link to the circular: Organisation of the schooling of newly arrived allophone students.
However, the good lady who was my hierarchical superior had no intention of letting me leave just like that. I "managed" this difficult class too well, and under my firm hand it caused her no trouble at all. She manipulated my ranking points: those points that determine seniority in a post and condition any possibility of transfer. Teachers are in fact graded like schoolchildren, and it seems to suit them since their advancement—that is, the money they receive each month and in retirement—depends on it, a system too subtle and complex to be described here. As a result of this manipulation I had no hope of being able to leave. Yet a few days before what is called the transfer movement, I happened to meet, during a hike in the Île-de-France region, a high-ranking official from the education authority. Having hit it off with him, he arranged an appointment for me with the administrator of the movement. I then argued that my ranking points had been taken into account in a non-regulatory manner and that if they were not restored I would go to the administrative court as soon as the movement results were out to assert my rights. There was a stormy discussion in a neighboring office where a superior received me and assured me that my rights had been restored and my ranking points reinstated.
"So you will get what you want," she told me. And indeed a few days later I was appointed to one of the prestigious applied arts schools in Paris. I will not dwell on those two years because, at bottom, it is off-topic. There I finished what is conventionally called a career, and at the end of June 2004 I permanently left the educational barracks of the national education system, promising myself never to set foot there again. Which has been the case, and on which I will not change my mind.
I will simply add that this calculating and soulless administration refused me the end-of-career carrot known as the "Hors-classe des certifiés," which I nevertheless deserved, and which still makes quite a substantial difference in the amount of the viaticum known as the retirement pension that the State grants to its honorary civil servants.
But it's fine, I feel no lack, and as Édith Piaf proclaimed: "I regret nothing."
Thus unfolded this existence as a humble teacher, and with a modest but regular income, leading a simple and frugal life, I was able to get through it without too many mishaps. After 47 years in Paris I now live in the provinces, alternating between a pretty little town and a village where I devote myself, of course, to gardening and to the contemplation of nature as men have not yet irreparably ravaged it. Having sold my first, only and last car upon returning from Morocco in 1974, taking the plane very rarely, no longer driving, sometimes traveling by carpool for short distances, and consequently having a "carbon footprint" and an "ecological footprint" (!) among the most "virtuous" (!), at the individual level, my share of responsibility in the ongoing disaster—moreover skillfully manipulated in the form of an alleged climate disruption bolstered by social engineering—is none other than that of having to survive.
Which is what I apply myself to as best I can in order to be able to continue enjoying life for as long as possible and above all to carry out the task I have undertaken by publishing this site, by launching this appeal for the safeguarding of childhood and youth who have been severely mistreated these past years under the pretext of a pseudo-pandemic orchestrated worldwide, in fact a monumental scam unprecedented in the entire history of humanity.
I will indeed need time and energy to set up, with those who are willing to join me and help me, even if only the beginnings of this holistic, transcultural, anti-globalist and radically free education. And it would already be a great deal if I manage to do so "in my lifetime," as they say.
Fragment of a keychain found on the stairs of a Parisian middle school (1980s) while going back up from recess with a class. Just as this child protects a bird, let us protect him — him and all the children of the world — offer him real educational content, and work to guarantee him fulfillment and freedom.
A visual look back at the 22 years spent with these children from the four corners of the world in a 22-minute video
