Word: reformations
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When French Education Minister Edgar Faure (TIME, Aug. 23) first presented his plans for reform of the nation's universities to the De Gaulle Cabinet, Foreign Minister Michel Debre listened and remarked: "It is madness." De Gaulle replied: "If the Minister of Education were mad, it would show." Quipped Faure: "According to some, there are disturbing symptoms...
...most sweeping revision of higher education in France since Napoleon established the imperial university system in 1808. Aimed at preventing a renewal of the kind of riots that shut down the universities last spring, Faure's program also attacks the bureaucratic rigidity of the highly centralized system. His reform bill, which will not take full effect for at least a year, specifically indicts the "inhuman dimensions," "immobility," "isolation," and "superficial and arbitrary examinations" of the present system...
Stripping the Ministry. Faure's reform seeks to remedy those ills by stripping the central education ministry of its powers to select the presidents of each of France's present 23 universities, appoint their professors, determine their curriculums, draw up and grade exams, dictate teaching methods. Most of those powers will shift to regional and local university councils, which will include teachers, students, and even outside educational experts and political leaders...
...Question. Faure's reform met more opposition outside the Assembly than in it. One association of professors warned that decentralization of the system and student participation on the councils could lead to anarchy. The costs of creating new universities and implementing new teaching methods worries other groups. A notable critic of the plan is Political Analyst Raymond Aron, who argued in the Figaro that the law could lead to a politicalization of the universities. "This is not renovation," he wrote. "It is ruin...
...Lindsay's plan had succeeded, the three Ford districts would probably have dropped from sight, submerged in a city-wide wave of reform. The legislature, however, succumbed to intense pressure from New York's United Federation of Teachers and from New York school administrators, and emasculated Lindsay's legislation. Their hopes shattered, ghetto communities concluded that the political process offered no chance for effective change, and moved on to a confrontation of raw power in the city streets. Ocean Hill-Brownsville offered the first opportunity...