Teachers cover a song by a French artist and the video goes viral.
Two days before the publication of the official texts on the operation of level groups and while a teaching strike is planned for March 19, a group of teachers in Loire-Atlantique has chosen to protest using music. The reform of level groups proposed by Gabriel Attal when he was still Minister of Education is very poorly received by teachers who fear the stigmatization of students. In reaction to this reform, the profession's low salaries and the lack of personnel and resources, education union organizations are calling on all teachers to strike and mobilize on March 19.
A group of teachers from the René-Guy college in the commune of Montoir-de-Bretagne, near Saint-Nazaire, accompanied by colleagues from Nantes and Rezé posted on YouTube, on March 2, a video in which the group resumes the song Les Gens qui doutes by French singer Anne Sylvestre. Renamed The Chaos of Knowledge, the title takes up Gabriel Attal’s expression of the “clash of knowledge”. The lyrics of the song represent the arguments of teachers who are opposed to these level groups, for example: "The groups are 30, we don't even have room to put a stool anymore; there would still be a class where they There are only 15, it’s the bad group.” After several repetitions of the refrain “where do we put this one?, where do we put this one?”; the song concludes with a sentence reflecting the teachers' opposition to the measure: "We don't have the level for the level groups".
The song performed by the group De Nivo exceeded 25,000 views on the platform on Wednesday March 13. The teachers weren't expecting that much, as they explained to Ouest-France: "We said to ourselves that 1,000 views for our little song wouldn't be bad enough..." One of the members of the group, Elena Bascou, professor of French, confides to the media: “We wanted to get the message across to families”. “Classifying according to a level is simplistic, the students are richer than that,” she added.
This controversial reform should come into force from the start of the September 2024 school year in middle schools for sixth and fifth grade students. It concerns French and mathematics lessons and, as the Prime Minister pointed out to AFP, the latter would like these groups to become more frequent than entire classes.
