Quand l’école rend malade ("When school makes us sick")

Le jour où je n’ai pas pu aller à l’école ("The day I couldn't go to school")

Anne-Marie Rocco, Justine Touchard

Flammarion, 324 p.

Some students have no choice but to drop out: their bodies demand it. Stomach aches, anorexia, stress, insomnia, feelings of suffocation... Going to school makes them sick: it's school phobia. In France, 116,000 students suffer from it every year. In Japan, they are 1 million.

The day I couldn't go to college is a two-part story told by 15-year-old Justine Touchard and her mother, Anne-Marie Rocco. For several years, the very sensitive Justine had felt the pressure of the French school, with its incompetent teachers and the crowd of students in her class, squeezing her. "And one day, it did break." She couldn't get out of bed. Her mother watched the world fall apart. "We were left groggy, unable to react, and with no one to help us." Can we make it through when the only known education system is killing us slowly? Without a degree, are we condemned to poverty and rejection? Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Yet we see that Justine is smart: she expresses herself perfectly, and struggles as much as her mother to find a way to educate herself without losing her skin. She loves to learn and wants to lead an interesting life. So do the rest of the students she meets who have the same disease as her. "Without exception, they are normally intelligent kids who want to succeed, and whose parents are not resigned." So the problem is not with the student. But if it's not there, where is it?

Justine knows this. An entire chapter lists the improvements she would like to make to the school. "In my ideal school, the student's personality would be taken into account. [...] I've always known teachers who are behind on their curriculum. [...] Grading is, for me, the main flaw in teaching. [...] A psychologist should be there every day to see the students. She knows that the traditional school, the only one she knows, will not allow her to flourish.

Mother and daughter take turns telling the story of their struggle to recover and find an alternative method, in an administrative labyrinth worthy of Asterix's madhouse. They try everything: correspondence education, help from a tutor, specialized schools... None of them are suitable. The solution may exist, but you have to know how to find it, and without help.

They finally found a solution, after nearly two years of withdrawal: a "pocket" high school, which does not accommodate more than 450 students. Justine was lucky. What about the other 115,999?