‘Maternal’ Schools Rear France’s Littlest Students

Come next month, a lot of American parents might well envy Isabelle Marconville.

On Sept. 6, the wife of a government prosecutor in this rural region near the English Channel will escort her 2-year-old daughter, Clemence, to her first day at a state-run, tax-financed ecole maternelle (literally, “maternal school”).

For Clemence, there may be some tears and anxiety in the school courtyard as she is gently separated from her mother and placed in the care of strangers. But like the majority of French parents, Marconville believes it’s a small price to pay for what her daughter will learn.

“Young children need to see something besides their mother,” the 31-year-old homemaker says. “They need to be opened to other things, to learn they are not alone in the world.”

A Rite of Passage for French Children

More than a century old, France’s experience with public schools for children ages 2 to 6 is one of the models being scrutinized as California ponders whether it should phase in universal education for 3- and 4-year-olds over the coming decade. State Supt. Delaine Eastin has backed legislation to create a commission charged with drawing up a master plan. The estimated cost: $5 billion annually.

But until tax-financed preschool comes along, many working parents in California will have little alternative but private day care or nursery schools for as much as $900 a month.

Compare that with what’s available in Saint-Omer, a historic and handsome market town of 15,000 inland from the port city of Calais. Saint-Omer boasts five public maternal schools; each year the town spends more than $280 per pupil to maintain the buildings and pay the salaries of aides who clean, help the teachers and function as surrogate parents, teaching youngsters to tie their shoes or button their coats. The teachers, paid directly by the Ministry of National Education, make $1,300 to $2,500 a month.

Some schools accept children only in the morning. At others, parents have the option of adding lunch and subsidized day care, so that their young sons and daughters are looked after without interruption from 7:15 a.m. to 6 p.m. Day care would cost 15 francs, or $2.50, per day, and a hot lunch about the same.

Since their creation in 1882, maternal schools have become a virtually obligatory rite of passage of French childhood. Though attendance is purely voluntary, nearly 100% of children ages 3 to 6 now attend, as well as 34.9% of 2-year-olds. That second figure could easily be much higher, but many cities, including Paris and Lille, don’t accept the youngest of children for lack of space.

In a program akin to Operation Head Start in the United States, 2-year-olds may be admitted in poor urban or rural neighborhoods of France when the government has decided to give the local economy a jump start. In an increasingly diverse population where boys and girls from Mali, Sri Lanka, China and other foreign countries may make up a sizable proportion of the class, learning the rudiments of good French will become the No. 1 priority at all maternal schools starting this autumn.

“Without being compulsory, the maternal school has become the basis of the school system,” the Ministry of National Education said in a recent report.

“Everything, in sum, starts here,” stressed Public Schools Minister Segolene Royal in a circular to maternal schools.

In the ongoing debate on whether family or school is the most suitable place for a very young child, French educators come squarely down on the side of school. For mothers and fathers who might worry that 2 is too tender an age to relinquish such control, Marconville cites a case study proving the contrary: the experience of Clemence’s older sister Pauline, now 5 1/2 and about to enter primary school.

Before she attended Ecole Jacques Prevert, an establishment with 160 pupils grouped in six classes, Pauline was a difficult child who tried to monopolize the attention of grown-ups, rarely spoke and was something of a bully, her mother recalls.

“Maternal school developed her language skills immensely--through gymnastics, music, drawing, songs and poems,” Marconville said. She remembers her astonishment when her usually mute daughter returned home at age 2 1/2 one day and proudly recited a seven-line poem she’d memorized for Mother’s Day.

In the classroom, Pauline also learned to share and to play with other children. Every Monday, she and the rest of her class went to a swimming pool. Weekly, she took part in a computer workshop.

“The children, from 2 to 6, are in a constant state of play. Because that’s the way children at that age learn,” said Therese Boisdon, principal of another maternal school situated on the edge of Saint-Omer, where truck farmers grow cauliflower, lettuce and other vegetables.

By decision of the French government, this first contact with education is also supposed to instill the notion that right is more important than might, that it is better to be honest than to lie, and other moral precepts. At Boisdon’s school, white lines have been traced on the courtyard’s pavement for young children on scooters to learn the basis of the traffic code. Violators during the game are relegated to a square marked “prison.”

At a time of concern about child abuse and hazing in France, the government in Paris has also decreed that school be the place where “children learn to say no” and where help and a sympathetic ear are available if a youngster needs them.

Maternelle Teachers Wear Many Hats

A cheerful whirlwind of activity, Boisdon, 58, presides over a nationwide association of maternal school teachers (once reserved for women, the jobs have been open to men since 1977). She worries that in some parts of the country, including the Saint-Omer district where she works amid a populace of struggling farmers, maternal schools are being compelled to perform too many functions.

“We’re teaching more and more children the first rules of living together, though that should be the job of the parents,” Boisdon says. “And with the parents, sometimes we have to be the referee, sometimes the marriage counselor, sometimes the buffer from the administration. We fill roles that the parish priest [and] the doctor used to fill.”

School districting usually doesn’t give French families a choice of which maternelle their child attends, and that can be a source of additional problems. Despite the avowed goal of equal access to a good education, some French public schools, like their U.S. counterparts, are more highly rated or richer than others.

Marconville’s husband has been kidded by co-workers that his younger daughter might come home from Ecole Jacques Prevert speaking Turkish, since the classes include children of many immigrants. Because they believe Clemence will gain from being exposed to children of differing backgrounds, the Marconvilles aren’t bothered. But not all parents agree.

“People don’t want to send their kids to schools with ‘ghetto’ reputations,” Isabelle Marconville reports. In Saint-Omer, five private maternal schools now operate--as many as the number of public institutions. Some children attend to receive religious instruction, others in a sort of French variation of the “white flight” that American urban schools have been plagued by for decades.

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SMALL STEPS TOWARD PRESCHOOL

Voluntary universal preschool for 4-year-olds has been implemented in two states so far: Georgia in 1993 and in New York in 1995. The California Department of Education wants the Legislature to establish a commission to point the way to universal preschool here. With 536,771 4-year olds in California, such a program would be the largest in the country.

Population figures as of July 1998

Georgia

4-year-olds: 113,307

In preschool: 61,000

New York

4-year-olds: 261,859

In preschool: 19,000

Sources: Cato Institute; Los Angeles Times stories; U.S. Census Bureau, State of Georgia Pre-K Program, New York State Education Department.

For More Child Care Information

An extensive list of child care resources and the complete Caring for Our Children series are available on The Times’ web site:

https://www.latimes.com/caring

The California Superintendent of Public Instruction convened a Universal Preschool Task Force in November 1997. The summary and recommendations of the task force are available at:

https://www.cde.ca.gov/preschool

Information about the Pre-K Program in the state of Georgia is available at:

https://www.osr.state.ga.us/prekprogram1.html

“Universal Preschool Is No Golden Ticket” Cato Institute, February 9, 1999

https://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa333.pdf

Compiled by Maloy Moore, Los Angeles Times Editorial Library