Political debate, at some point, stops being rational. This point has been reached in France on a subject that many hold dear: education.

French voters tend to have a paradoxical view of their national school system: they’re intensely proud of it, but also convinced that it has broken down and is in need of reform. There’s an unwritten law that each education minister propose a reform to restore the system to its former glory and enable it to perform as never before. Most reforms don’t get far.

France has a national curriculum in primary education through high school, to which the current education minister, Luc Chatel, is intent on making changes. His reform would alter the terminale, the final year of high school.

The Chatel reform would remove history from the terminale curriculum for some students. Today, these students spend 2 1/2 hours of class time per week on history. If the Chatel reform were enacted, history would rise from 2 1/2 to 4 hours per week in the year before terminale (“junior year”), then drop to zero in terminale (“senior year”).

The reaction was expected and quick to come: history teachers, humanities academics, and labor politicians expressed their horror at the evisceration of a central part of the curriculum.

What makes this debate stand out, and what pushed it outside the realm of rational discourse, has to do with the target population.

In France, high school ends with an examination, the baccalauréat. It’s a national examination, but not a unitary one: like ice cream, the baccalauréat comes in many flavors. There are “professional” or “technical” baccalauréats in woodworking, bookkeeping, and other trades. And there is the “general” baccalauréat, for students who intend to go on to higher education, and which is offered in several varieties: scientific, literary, and social sciences.

Over the years, conventional wisdom deemed the scientific baccalauréat as best, followed by the social science alternative; the literary variant was  neglected. Students and their families are voting with their feet: in 2008, among terminale students in general or technical sections, 34.2% were in a scientific section, 21.2% were in a social science section, and 11.4% were in a literary section. For whatever reason, when offered a choice, students and their families prefer the scientific section.

The Chatel reform seeks, bizarrely, to reverse this trend by making the scientific section less “elitist”. Presumably, only students genuinely interested in science would go into the scientific section; others would increasingly head for the social science or literary alternative.

Dumbing down the curriculum to manipulate the outcome of choice makes no sense. This point has been made, and I hope will condemn the Chatel reform.

Two other points are missing from the French debate. Both should be present. I’ll mention them here.

The first is a strong voice that would ask: if we curtail history for the scientific section, will we also increase biology (or another science) for the literary section? I suspect this voice is absent or muted because popular prejudice holds science to be the reserve of the scientific section alone.

The second is a more basic questioning of the need for different sections in terminale. If all, or nearly all, students go on to higher education, wouldn’t the best preparation be a well-rounded curriculum, with both humanities and science courses? Why jump the gun and impose choices that may prove premature and wrong-headed? Yet few commentators have seized on the absurdity of asking an adolescent to choose between science and letters at age 17. Most French students change course after they begin their post-secondary studies, so any curricular choice they make while in high school should be greeted with skepticism.