Place et rôle des langues et cultures de l'Antiquité dans l'enseignement du français à l'école primaire de 1882 à nos jours en France

摘要

French language was and still remains the priority of French primary school. Despite this will, reality is a bit different: learning French remains complicated at school, there are big gaps between pupils. According to the results from PISA's survey (2012), our system of education is « very good » at creating even more inequalities between pupils. How can such difference be explained? Moreover, why is French so hard to teach and to learn? In order to answer these questions, a diachronic approach was salutary in many respects. At first, it is important to describe and to understand how our school was built. In addition, the place of Classics – Latin and Ancient Greek – was once great in our system, and their nearly disappearance had serious consequences on French learning. Indeed, the history of the language and the discipline shows us that French could not have been taught without classics for a long time. In our analysis, we question these links and we consider introducing classics in French learning at primary school. Classics reveal themselves to be very precious tools in order to create postures among pupils – reflexive, metalinguistic and epistemic – which allow them to succeed. They help all pupils to acquire strategies, which enable them to learn a rich language, therefore to develop a rich mind. Moreover, antic culture is at the basis of all fields of knowledge, it is a link between all disciplines and it makes them meaningful.