“The drop in the number of students must not result in the gradual dismantling of rural schools” | EUROtoday

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En France, the demographic decline is immediately too usually used as an argument to justify the closure of colleges in rural areas. This is the accounting logic that’s required, chilly and methodical.

Every 12 months, academy inspectors from France and Navarre take out their calculators to depend the scholars and determine the destiny of positions and lessons. During this time, the State asks elected officers to incorporate their city planning coverage in regional planning, sustainable growth and territorial equality plans, territorial coherence plans, native intercommunal city planning plans or native city planning plans, requiring mayors to see far forward.

However, opposite to those necessities, nationwide schooling nonetheless stays the one ministry which adapts its positions annually to the counting, to the closest unit, of its customers; the one ministry that escapes any actual strategy to foresight and projection.

Background work

This statement disrupts many different human, financial, social and territorial realities. Undeniably, we is not going to battle towards rural desertification by eradicating what nonetheless constitutes its beating coronary heart. Republican equality can’t be lowered to accounting and budgetary logic alone. Closing a college usually, too usually, means longer journey occasions, elevated fatigue for kids and fogeys shifting away from college.

Placing the kid on the coronary heart of the varsity system shouldn’t be a slogan, however an academic necessity. The good outcomes of rural faculties remind us of a easy reality: an efficient college system is above all one able to adapting to youngsters, and never the opposite manner round. Small lessons, proximity of lecturers to college students and their households, attentive and peaceable college local weather: all situations which promote individualized assist and strengthen youngsters’s confidence.

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https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2026/03/04/la-baisse-du-nombre-d-eleves-ne-doit-pas-se-traduire-par-le-demantelement-progressif-des-ecoles-rurales_6669471_3232.html