Gaston Ternes

 

About the fragmentation of the educational landscape

seen Gaston TERNES

 

The fragmentation of the educational landscape is not specifically “Luxembourgish”. This is a general phenomenon! According to researchers Anne Barrère and Bernard Delvaux (University of Paris-Descartes and Namur), there are three major reasons for this in the context of globalization: the increasing heterogeneity of the population, the desire to be able to continue one's studies with like-minded people and an individual design of the learning path.

Fragmentation itself is reflected in Luxembourg by the creation of international or European schools, Montessori schools, to name just a few.

Three years after the launch of this idea of fragmentation of the educational landscape in Luxembourg, we must now ask ourselves where we want to go: do we want an ever greater division of the educational landscape in order, like the government program, to be more able to satisfy the needs of each learner? Or, on the contrary, does this fragmentation contribute to even more inequalities? The differences “expensive schools” versus “free schools” or “unconstrained teacher recruitment” versus “state-regulated recruitment” support the latter idea.

The most likely scenario for the years to come will be an ever-increasing fragmentation of the educational landscape, with private and public actors. In this scenario, it is young people and their parents who decide what they choose in the diverse “marketplace” of the school landscape. It seems obvious to me that the scale of inequalities will widen.

Fragmentation poses a second problem: if a young person can, to a certain extent, choose their school system "à la carte", is there not a great danger that they will choose the easiest path for themselves? ? It may well be that the full intellectual potential of certain young people is no longer being exploited.

Sweden is today, after more than 30 years of an increasingly fragmented school landscape, finding its way towards a more unified school landscape. Indeed, inequalities have increased massively and the overall performance of Swedish education provision has fallen from the leading pack to below average.

For us, this does not mean that we should not wait for the reforms to take effect, but that we must support them now!