France Has Forgotten How to Transmit Its Culture

France Has Forgotten How to Transmit Its Culture

By: Xavier-Laurent Salvador 

1. The School That Made France
France once possessed one of the most powerful instruments of cultural transmission in the world: its school system. The French Republic used schools to make French the common language of a country that was still linguistically diverse. In Brittany, as in other regions, generations of children learned French at school while regional languages progressively
disappeared from public life. The methods used were sometimes brutal, and nobody should wish to reproduce them today. But the historical fact remains: the Republican school had a deliberately unifying mission. It believed that a common language and culture could be
transmitted (/https://eduscol.education.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/l-idee-republicaine-2024-72816.pdf?attachment).

The same confidence existed outside metropolitan France. From Algeria to Vietnam, from Central Africa to Pondicherry, French schools transmitted the French language and elements of French culture. And although I certainly do not intend to defend colonization, it is to observe
the extraordinary confidence France once had in the possibility of cultural transmission. A country that once believed it could teach French civilization in Pondicherry now doubts its ability to teach French grammar in Paris. Something else happened after decolonization. The necessary criticism of colonial domination gradually became, in parts of French intellectual life, a suspicion of the very idea of cultural transmission. Historical criticism changes nature when it produces a permanent culture of national repentance. In the process, two very different things have been confused: imposing a culture by force, and believing that a civilization has something worth transmitting.

2. A European Crisis of Transmission
The latest PISA results make the consequences difficult to ignore. In 2025, French results in mathematics and reading fell again compared with 2022. In all three main subjects, performance is now among the lowest ever measured by PISA in France.

Compared with 2015, the proportion of low-performing students has increased by 12 percentage points in mathematics and 11 in reading (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-
volume-i-country-notes_2d4ff9ea-en/france_6d229453-en.html).
France is not alone. The deterioration observed across many Western education systems suggests something deeper than the failure of one government or one reform. We may be facing a crisis in our understanding of education itself.

Immigration adds another difficulty, although it cannot simply be described as the cause of educational decline. At the beginning of the educational pipeline, schools must integrate children from increasingly diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. At the other end,
universities have themselves become highly internationalized. At my own university, Sorbonne Paris Nord, approximately one quarter of undergraduate students are foreign nationals. At Master’s level the proportion is around one third, with a strong representation of students from North Africa. In our internal figures, the proportion reached 37 percent in the second year of the Master’s degree.

There is nothing wrong with foreign students studying in France. Many are excellent students. The question is different. A society receiving populations from different cultural backgrounds needs a particularly strong idea of what it wishes to transmit. Immigration did not create the
French educational crisis. But an educational system that has lost confidence in assimilation is poorly equipped to deal with the challenge immigration creates. The old French school was interested less in where the parents came from than in where the children were going.

3. Laïcité Is Part of the Answer
This is where France may sometimes be misunderstood by American conservatives. I am a medievalist specializing in the history of the Bible. I also teach at the Catholic University of Paris. I therefore have little reason to want Christianity to disappear from European culture. On the contrary, I do not think European civilization can be understood without the Bible and Christianity. Yet I also believe strongly in French laïcité. There is no contradiction. French secularism creates a common civic space in which the religious identity of a child does not determine his relationship with the state. This principle is especially important today. In parts of France where communal and Islamist pressures have become strong, laïcité remains one of our most powerful instruments for protecting a common civic culture. The answer to Islamization is not necessarily for the French Republic to become less secular. It may be for the Republic to become more confident in its own secularism.

Jean Zay, one of the great Ministers of Education of the French Republic, wrote in 1936 that schools should remain “the inviolable sanctuary into which the quarrels of men do not enter.” His purpose was to protect schools from political propaganda. In 1937, he explicitly extended the same principle to religious proselytism (https://enseignement-moral-et-civique-pedagogie.web.ac-grenoble.fr/la-laicite-en-textes/jean-zay-1904-1944-circulaires-du-ministre-de-leducation-nationale). The
sentence remains remarkably modern. Children do not need schools to reproduce every political, religious and cultural conflict of adult society. They need schools to teach them.

4. Universities and Academic Sovereignty
The same problem appears at university in a different form. Last June, I testified before a French Senate commission on academic excellence. My argument was that what is commonly called “wokism” is not the fundamental cause of the crisis of French universities. It is partly a
symptom of something deeper: the loss of academic sovereignty. Research increasingly depends on competitive national and European funding. European cooperation has brought obvious benefits, including mobility and scientific partnerships. But funding creates incentives.
European institutions increasingly associate higher education with transversal objectives concerning inclusion, gender equality, environmental transition and other political priorities. The European Strategy for Universities explicitly asks universities to foster diversity and
inclusion and proposes institutional changes concerning diversity and gender equality (https://education.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2022-01/communication-european-
strategy-for-universities-graphic-version.pdf).

The problem is not that Brussels tells a medievalist what to think about a medieval manuscript. It is that Europe increasingly helps determine which questions universities are rewarded for asking. What begins as a funding priority becomes an administrative vocabulary. What becomes an
administrative vocabulary eventually reshapes academic institutions. This is why I prefer to speak about sovereignty rather than wokism. Scholarship requires a very simple freedom: the scholar must always retain the right to be wrong. If somebody proves tomorrow that my
interpretation of a medieval biblical text is false, I must change my interpretation. That is scholarship. But when political categories, personal identity or lived experience become part of the proof itself, disagreement risks becoming a moral conflict. France does not need an
American educational revolution. It needs to recover sovereignty over its own tradition.

5. Back to Basics, Forward with Technology
The answer begins with something very simple: return to the foundations.
Language first. Mathematics. History. Science. Literature.
We often tell children that they must learn “critical thinking.” But critical thinking cannot exist in a vacuum. Before teaching students to criticize knowledge, we must give them knowledge to criticize. Critical thinking without knowledge very quickly becomes opinion. We also need to
return to the classics. This year, at the Catholic University of Paris, I teach a course on the literature and cultures of Antiquity to students who generally know neither Greek nor Latin. We begin with the Greeks, with heroes, Athens and Thermopylae. But Western culture does not stop in Athens. It also passes through the biblical world, Rome and the emergence of Christian Rome. Before saying that schools should teach “our culture,” we must answer a difficult question: who
is the “we”? The Western “we” is not a racial category. It is not even simply geographical. It is a historical construction. Greece, Rome, the Bible, Christianity, medieval civilization, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and modern science have all contributed to it. Teaching this inheritance does not require children to believe in it. It requires them to know it.
But back to basics does not mean back to the past. Artificial intelligence may provide us with the most important educational opportunity in
generations. Mass education has always had a mathematical problem. A teacher can teach thirty children, but cannot give each of them an hour of individual tutoring every evening. Wealthy families have always partly solved this problem with private tutors. Most families cannot. AI changes the equation. Outside the classroom, every child could have access to a patient tutor able to explain the same mathematical problem five times, correct grammar, practise a foreign language, review a history
lesson or identify gaps in basic knowledge. But one distinction is essential. AI must be the tutor, never the professor. The teacher decides what is worth knowing. The teacher defines the curriculum, establishes standards and evaluates achievement. AI explains, repeats, trains and
adapts. I would therefore keep AI outside the classroom as much as possible, but make it available everywhere around it. The teacher teaches. The machine helps the student learn.

6. Learning to Transmit Again
The crisis of French education is not only a crisis of resources or methods. It is a crisis of transmission. France once possessed extraordinary confidence in its ability to transmit a language and a culture. Sometimes it did so too aggressively. We should learn from those
mistakes. But we should not conclude that transmission itself was the mistake. At school, we need again to teach language, mathematics, history, science and literature with demanding standards. At university, we need to restore academic sovereignty and the freedom of disciplines. In our understanding of culture, we need to recover the long history connecting Athens, Jerusalem and Rome to modern Europe.
And we should use artificial intelligence to give every child something mass education has never been able to provide universally: individual attention. The objective is intellectual freedom. Education gives young people the knowledge through which they can become free. Before
asking endlessly how we should teach, France, and perhaps Europe, must once again decide what it believes is worth teaching. 

Xavier-Laurent Salvador is a French medievalist, Agrégé de Lettres modernes and Habilité à Diriger des Recherches (HDR), specializing in the history of the Bible and its vernacular translations in the Middle Ages. He is Associate Professor at Sorbonne Paris Nord University (Paris 13) and also teaches at the Catholic University of Paris. His research focuses in particular on the Bible Historiale, medieval biblical exegesis, the history of the French language and digital humanities. He is co-founder and President of the Observatory of University Ethics (https://www.decolonialisme.fr), a network of French academics devoted to academic freedom, scientific standards and the study of contemporary ideological movements in higher education.

In June 2026, he testified before the French Senate’s Commission of Inquiry on academic excellence and the future of French universities.
He is also a regular contributor to French public debate through the press, radio and television. His recent books include Les Secrets de la Bible au Moyen Âge (Cerf, 2025), on the transmission and interpretation of the Bible in medieval culture, and Vérité et Écritures, devoted to the relationship between truth, language and Scripture.