“We give the baccalaureate to everyone.” True or false ?
“We give the baccalaureate to everyone.” What about it? The Pilgrim deciphers the subject for you.
- With 743,900 candidates and 674,900 baccalaureate graduates, the baccalaureate success rate stood at 90.7% in 2023. We have therefore largely exceeded the objective stated in 1985 by the former Minister of Education, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, of bringing 80% of an age group to the baccalaureate level. In two centuries, the democratization of secondary education has done its work: reserved for a very small bourgeois elite when it was created in 1808, the diploma already concerned 30,000 young people after the Second World War, and nearly 500 000 in the year 2000.
- Does the explosion in the number of high school graduates mean that the level has fallen? The answer is less simple than it seems. Young people are continuing their education more than those of previous generations. From this point of view, their level of education has therefore increased. If we consider the key subjects – French and maths – the average level has even increased in these disciplines because today's worst students are better than those in the 1970s thanks to educational systems. aid put in place.
- Have the tests been simplified to allow as many young people as possible to obtain the baccalaureate? “Methodologically, we cannot compare the baccalaureate of the 1950s, where only 12% of an age group obtained it, with that of today, which allows students from the middle and working classes to go as far as 'at the end of secondary education, answers Annabelle Allouch, lecturer in sociology at the University of Picardie-Jules-Verne. The students have changed: less good, for example, at dictation, they are better at understanding texts. The tests are not simpler but different. »
- Does wondering about the average level of the baccalaureate still make sense? Not really, it's the type of baccalaureate that counts now. No less than 13 specialties are offered from the first class in the new baccalaureate set up in 2019-2020 by Jean-Michel Blanquer. “The more the number of baccalaureate holders has increased, the more the baccalaureate has diversified,” comments sociologist François Dubet. Everyone tries to make choices that set them apart. »
