French Are Weighing a Shift To ‘Le Weekend’ for Pupils (Published 1972) (2024)

PARIS, April 8 (AP) — By tradition, French children go to school on Saturdays and have Thursdays off. The system is coming under attack — the idea of “le weekend,” comparatively new in France, has caught up with schooling. More and more parents want their children free to spend Saturday and Sunday with them.

A sampling of opinion involving 4,200 families in Saint‐Maur, a Paris suburb, showed that 75 per cent of the parents were in favor of Monday‐to‐Friday schooling. An experiment in the town of Niort with “the English week” has been well received.

Going to school on Saturday in Europe is no novelty—children do it in West Germany, the Soviet Union, Norway, Belgium, Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia. The unusual aspect of the French situation is getting Thursday off. That's where the opposition comes in.

Catholic Church Opposed

It emanates most powerfully from the Roman Catholic Church, but others see dangers in ending the Thursday system.

The church is involved because Thursday has been the traditional day for catechism class or other religious instruction. According to an independent poll, 80 per cent of the French think that is “useful.”

The church is generally believed to feel that the catechism will not survive free Saturdays, if only because priests are too busy then with other duties. A Catholic education official, the Rev. Bernard Goureau, warned that compressing the school week risked “causing stupefying work and then an ‘animal’ explosion of leisure.”

A group of 49 physicians wrote a report expressing concern that children's health could suffer from going to class five days in a row. “A full day off in the middle of the week allows a long sleep, giving back to the children the rest they miss on class days,” the paper said.

Most teachers, according to one survey, are against changing the system, and cite their own fatigue as well as fears that the students’ equilibrium could be troubled.

Letters to the editor and television debates reflect great seriousness. In one of the most impassioned letters, a reader of Le Monde wrote: “Thursday was made for the catechism. But it's also the day for Bey Scouts, the piano lesson, the model plane club, or the big game or even in‐depth study of Mao's thoughts. If you replace all that by the weekend with papa‐mania, you get accelerated fossilization, if not a general youth revolt. The question is whether the important thing in France is the car, the country house and the barbecue or the formation of tomorrow's men.”