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For the past few days, my eldest daughter, who is entering CE2, has been carrying a Petit Robert everywhere. “Dad, mom, can you give me a word so I can look for him?” » This is how we are now very familiar with the different uses of “ratatouille”, the composition of “jet” and the definition of “lignite”. One evening, when I went to give her a kiss, I found her in bed with two volumes of There Clan War and… an illustrated Larousse. “Tonight, I’m reading the dictionary!” »she announced to me cheerfully.
At the office, a few days later, I read about Lemonde.fr the column entitled: “Mr. Gabriel Attal, give back to writing, from primary school, its letters of nobility”. It is signed by a host of people who are as famous as they are disparate: Elisabeth Badinter, Abd al Malik, Isabelle Carré, Renaud, Jacques Attali, Jamel Debbouze, Anne Sinclair, Martin Solveig… “A large proportion of our children no longer read and struggle to write. They struggle to write in the sense of articulating their thoughts and reasoning”, they are alarmed. In this text urgency and distress shine through. “Learning to write is learning to think, to establish your ideas, to communicate, to emancipate yourself. (…) It’s being able to connect with yourself and others through words. What will happen tomorrow if these notions essential to the foundation of every human being, every society, every civilization are undermined? »
In an excellent survey published on August 31 in The Obsjournalist Gurvan Le Guellec recalls that at the end of 3eaccording to ministry data, only 55% of middle school students have a satisfactory command of the language, 37.5% say they are discouraged at the idea of reading a text exceeding one page and 40% have difficulty when it comes to expressing an opinion .
Parental narcissism
This collision between statistical reality and my family reality led me to think. A good number of French students struggle to read correctly; my daughter devours books faster than we can supply them. I would like to be able to continue to say, with a candid air, during parents’ aperitifs: “Yes, it’s crazy, we’ve done absolutely nothing about it, and yet she’s pionate about reading! » or “She learned everything on her own, we don’t want to push her!” » Except that’s not true. Certainly, we do not do any day-to-day school supervision – she leads her life alone. But that does not mean that his ability to speak French is purely the result of chance or his intelligence, contrary to what our parental narcissism would like to believe.
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