AROUND 15 million people attend school in France today. They range from preschool kids to graduate students and even those adults attending continuing education. Some of them are even foreigners who are here in France to advance their studies because of technological advances here. Most of these college scholars come from such countries as Syria or Iran. Although students from these countries can easily get to France, they need a visa to do so. Only students from other European countries can get inside France without a visa. Also, under the Schengen agreement, French authorities do not erect outposts in land border crossings throughout the country.

The current education minister in France is Xavier Darcos. Darcos has a PhD in Latin studies and is a former college professor prior to helming the education ministry in the land which has a 64.6 billion euro budget. Because of that huge budget, 99 percent of the people in France are all literate. This is partly due to a European Union mandate which orders member countries to make it compulsory for their high school students to study a second language. The European Union education ministry authorities have made this suggestion because they have known that Europe is a landlocked continent consisting of neighboring countries which speak various dialects. Consider Spain alone. It is located in the same Iberian Peninsula yet it has many dialects like Castilian and Basque. Far north on the same Iberian Peninsula lays Portugal which has its own Spanish language variant. Of the 15 million enrolled in French colleges today, 6.7 million are elementary students, 4.8 million are high school students, and 2.3 million are college students. Among the 2.3 million are the Middle Eastern students who are mostly concentrated in the fields of medicine, physics and molecular technology.

Because French education is decentralized, the national government has divided it into three educational districts. Zone A is composed of Clermont-Ferrand, Caen, Montpellier, Grenoble, Lyon, Nancy-Metz, Nantes, Rennes and Toulouse. Zone B is composed of Aix-Marseille, Amiens, Besancon, Dijon, Lille, Limoges, Nice, Orleans-Tours, Poitiers, Reims, Rouen and Strasbourg. Zone C is composed of Bordeaux, Creteil, Paris and Versailles. Official academic breaks are La Toussaint (the French equivalent of Halloween – it is an official holiday here because majority of the French are Catholics), Noel or Christmas, winter or hiver (two weeks in mid-February), spring in mid-April and of course, the two-month summer vacation.

Pre-school education must be given emphasis as the development of a child’s brain starts when the child is still a toddler. Thus, the first day of school of a child must be attended by both parents. The parents must be in the viewing room during the first day of school so that they can asses how their child is interacting with other children. During the first day of pre-school, the classroom is likewise filled with a pediatric psychologist to assess the behavior of the children. As the child grows older, he or she can accelerate to another year. But before doing so, the school administration must assess the performance of the child.