School transmits knowledge; family, according to the Institut Thomas More report, transmits a symbolic structure. Between the two sits cultural policy. This second installment reviews seven decisions taken over half a century - the collège unique (comprehensive lower-secondary school) created by the loi Haby (1975), the décret Lang (1982), the loi Jospin (1989), the restitution of cultural property (2010), marriage opened to same-sex couples (2013), the loi Peillon (2013), and the EVARS sex-education program (2025) - in the order the report dates them, with what it documents and the reading it offers.
1975: the collège unique, “the first act of a race to the bottom”
The loi Haby of 11 July 1975 created the collège unique, the single comprehensive lower-secondary school for all pupils leaving primary school: it abolished early-tracking programs (the CES and CEG), imposed identical teaching from sixth to ninth grade (6e to 3e), and delayed streaming, with a stated goal - written into law for the first time - of guaranteeing “l’égalité des chances” (“equality of opportunity”). The report calls it, in its own words, “un point de bascule dans l’histoire du système éducatif français” (“a turning point in the history of the French education system”), and sums up its thesis this way: “En instaurant le collège unique, la loi Haby favorise l’égalitarisme, engage la baisse du niveau scolaire et aggrave les inégalités réelles.” (“By instituting the single comprehensive school, the loi Haby favors egalitarianism, sets off a decline in academic standards, and worsens real inequality.”)
In support, the report cites several sets of public data. According to the OECD’s PISA 2024 rankings (85 countries), France sits in the middle of the pack but trails the leaders: 23rd in mathematics, 28th in reading comprehension, 26th in science - and the same study ranks France among the countries with the widest gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils, the latter being ten times more likely to be rated “en difficulté” (“struggling”). It also cites French Ministry of Education evaluations (2024-2025): only 45.7% of primary-school pupils (grades 1 through 5) show a satisfactory command of spelling, 41.4% of reading comprehension. On the economic side, it cites a figure attributed to INSEE, the national statistics institute: 60% of a generation reaches at least two years of higher education, while 55% of jobs are accessible with a high-school diploma or less.
1982: the décret Lang, from “cultural democratization” to “cultural democracy”
The founding decree of 24 July 1959, drafted under André Malraux’s authority, tasked the Ministry of Culture with making accessible the “œuvres capitales de l’humanité, et d’abord de la France, au plus grand nombre possible de Français” (“masterworks of humanity, and above all of France, to the greatest possible number of French people”). The decree signed by Jack Lang on 10 May 1982 replaced that opening article with another: the ministry’s mission became to “permettre à tous les Français de cultiver leur capacité d’inventer et de créer, d’exprimer librement leurs talents et de recevoir la formation artistique de leur choix” (“enable every French person to cultivate their capacity to invent and create, to freely express their talents, and to receive the artistic training of their choice”). The report reads this shift in wording as a fundamental pivot: “Le décret Lang opère une révolution silencieuse dans la politique culturelle : l’État abdique son rôle de transmetteur d’un patrimoine universel pour devenir le financeur indifférencié de toutes les expressions.” (“The décret Lang carries out a silent revolution in cultural policy: the state abdicates its role as transmitter of a universal heritage to become the undifferentiated funder of every form of expression.”)
The report documents the budgetary scale of the shift: the ministry’s budget doubles as soon as 1982 (from 2.6 to 6 billion francs), reaching 13.8 billion by 1993; subsidized theater companies grow from 200 to 600. It also cites a 1990 survey commissioned by the ministry itself: despite the near-doubling of the number of baccalauréat holders between 1973 and 1989, museum attendance rose only from 27% to 30% among the French overall - and fell among manual workers, from 26% to 23%.
1989: the loi Jospin puts the pupil “at the center”
The orientation law of 10 July 1989, championed by Lionel Jospin, set a target of 80% of an age cohort reaching baccalauréat level, created teaching cycles, the school project and the institution project, and established the IUFM teacher-training institutes. Its first article states that “le service public de l’éducation est conçu et organisé en fonction des élèves et des étudiants. Il contribue à l’égalité des chances” (“public education is designed and organized around pupils and students. It contributes to equality of opportunity”); its article 10 grants lower- and upper-secondary pupils a “liberté d’expression” (“freedom of expression”), whose exercise “ne peut porter atteinte aux activités d’enseignement” (“may not interfere with teaching activities”). The report sums up its reading this way: “En consacrant l’élève au centre du système scolaire, la loi Jospin sacrifie exigence, transmission et autorité à l’école.” (“By enshrining the pupil at the center of the school system, the loi Jospin sacrifices rigor, the transmission of knowledge, and authority at school.”) It cites the former teacher and essayist Jean-Paul Brighelli, for whom the law “le réinstitue en petit roi” (“reinstates the child as a little king”) - a reading the report adopts as its own, and which remains attributed to Brighelli.
2010-2026: restitution of cultural property, from exception to permanent mechanism
The report traces a precise chronology. In 2007, Rouen’s city council decided to return a Maori head held since 1875 in its collections to New Zealand; the decision was struck down by the administrative court in late 2007, then by the Douai court of appeal in 2008, on the grounds of the principle of inalienability of public collections. A private member’s bill sidestepped that case law: passed by the Senate in June 2009 and by the National Assembly on 4 May 2010 (457 votes to 8), it became the law of 18 May 2010 authorizing that restitution. According to the report, what followed was Emmanuel Macron’s Ouagadougou speech (November 2017), the Sarr-Savoy report (November 2018), the return of El Hadj Oumar Tall’s saber (November 2019), the law on restitution to Benin and Senegal (December 2020), then the loan of an Ivorian talking drum signed by Rachida Dati (November 2024). The law of 9 May 2026, the report says, establishes a general and permanent mechanism: a decree issued by the Conseil d’État now suffices to declassify an item from the national collections, for a retained period running from 1815 to 1972. The report sums up its reading this way: “La loi de 2010 a ouvert une brèche, aujourd’hui béante, dans l’inaliénabilité des collections des musées nationaux dans laquelle s’engouffrent les promoteurs du décolonialisme et de la repentance.” (“The 2010 law opened a breach - now gaping wide - in the inalienability of national museum collections, one that promoters of decolonialism and of repentance politics have since rushed through.”) That is the report’s own reading, not a judgment this series endorses.
2013: marriage opened to same-sex couples
The law of 17 May 2013 opened marriage, and with it adoption, to same-sex couples. It did not, at that date, open medically assisted reproduction: that came with the bioethics law of 2 August 2021, which extended assisted reproduction to all women, whether partnered or not. The report titles its reading of the 2013 law “la rupture anthropologique” (“the anthropological rupture”) and sums it up this way: “En bouleversant la filiation, le législateur fragilise la famille, fissure le pacte social français et prive l’enfant de la référence fondatrice de sa raison d’être au monde.” (“By upending lines of descent, the legislature weakens the family, cracks the French social contract, and deprives the child of the founding reference point for their place in the world.”) The report develops this reading over two pages, tracing it to a divergence it identifies between French and North American conceptions of family law. This is the report’s own thesis, presented here as such - neither endorsed nor rebutted: this series takes no position on the question, which is reserved for the final installment.
2013: the loi Peillon and the “citadel of progressivism”
The law of 8 July 2013, known as the loi Peillon, runs to 89 articles. It replaced the “socle commun” (“common core”) set up by the 2005 loi Fillon with a “socle de connaissances, de compétences et de culture” (“core of knowledge, skills and culture,” article 13), completed the school-schedule reform launched by decree in January 2013, created the Conseil supérieur des programmes (the national curriculum council, article 32), and replaced the IUFM teacher-training institutes with the ESPE (articles 68 to 76). The report sums it up this way: “Programmes scolaires, refus de l’exigence, approche idéologique : la loi Peillon institutionnalise tous les mauvais choix pour l’école.” (“Curricula, a rejection of rigor, an ideological approach: the loi Peillon institutionalizes every wrong choice for schools.”) Citing a Figaro article, it also notes the late-2025 appointment of MP Rodrigo Arenas to the Conseil supérieur des programmes - a characterization that remains that of the cited source, not a finding of this series.
2025: the EVARS program, twenty-four years after an unenforced law
Since the law of 4 July 2001 on abortion and contraception, the code de l’éducation (Education Code) has required at least three annual sessions of sex education, from primary school through the end of secondary school. A 2024 report by the Conseil économique, social et environnemental (CESE, France’s economic, social and environmental council), cited by the Institut Thomas More report, found that this obligation was not being enforced, and pointed to the “frilosité” (“timidity”) of authorities “qui souhaitent éviter les controverses” (“who wish to avoid controversy”). The decree of 3 February 2025, signed by Education Minister Elisabeth Borne, translates this into regulation: it sets out a program of “éducation à la vie affective et relationnelle” (education in emotional and relational life, EVAR) for nursery and primary school, and a program of “éducation à la vie affective, relationnelle et à la sexualité” (education in emotional, relational and sexual life, EVARS) for lower- and upper-secondary school - the word “sexualité” appearing, in the title cited by the report, only from lower-secondary school onward. That is the only age-based breakdown the report documents in the pages consulted for this installment; it does not detail, session by session, what the primary-school content covers.
The report titles its reading of this decision “l’école se trompe et trompe l’enfant” (“the school is wrong, and misleads the child”) and sums it up this way: “En prétendant “enseigner” la sexualité à l’école, l’État méconnaît les fondamentaux de la psychologie de l’enfant et de l’adolescent.” (“In claiming to ‘teach’ sexuality at school, the state disregards the fundamentals of child and adolescent psychology.”) It develops the argument over two pages: sexuality, it argues, cannot be the subject of instruction delivered by adults outside the family, and it sees in EVARS “le sommet d’une dérive de l’Éducation nationale, qui sort de plus en plus de son rôle de transmission des savoirs pour s’occuper du formatage des consciences” (“perhaps the peak of a drift within national education, which increasingly strays from its role of transmitting knowledge to busy itself with shaping minds”). This is the report’s own reading, presented and attributed as such - not a conclusion this series draws on its own account.
What this installment finds
Seven decisions, one pattern: a text welcomed as consensual, a shift judged underestimated at the time, effects read decades later as the sign of a weakening - of academic standards, cultural rigor, family structure. The dated facts and the texts cited can be checked independently, as in the first installment. The reading the report draws from them, especially on marriage equality and EVARS, remains its own: the position of an avowedly partisan think tank, not a neutral finding.
This eight-part series offers an outside reading of the report - it is not a publication of the Institut Thomas More. Read the full report (PDF, 112 pages, in French) - 1975-2025 : les 50 décisions qui ont coulé la France, coordinated by Jean de Belot, Tarick Dali and Jean-Thomas Lesueur, Institut Thomas More, June 2026.
