Quarrels school: debate in Queyras (historical and cultural dictionary) 
It is not easy to deal with the school, its history or its history, literacy, law school, with detached serenity which is appropriate for the study of these questions. Not that the documents are missing, on the contrary, they are even too many. Since the XIXth, military measured using tests of academic skills recruits. By the mid-nineteenth s, directors of the Department of Public Instruction studied the effects that major laws have had on the literacy of the French. In our universities, dozens of theses are defended each year in which the authors analyze the educational laws, history of education since ancient times, various theories in pedagogy, regulations, programs, instruction departmental, etc..
short, these are not findings that arouse the passions, but interpretations that historians or ideologues do not fail to propose, because anything that affects in any way the school is the subject of ideological speculations . Without pay in a caricature moved, remember that for two centuries and even more, a heated debate, leading to constant controversy, the proponents of two opposing conceptions of the school, who object to each other parallel arguments. For some, religion and the teachings that it broadcasts are only sources of light for others to obscurantism. For some reason one can awaken the decision, for others, she is blind, so it is not based on faith.
Writers Queyrassins who handled the investigation have also participated in this debate, both Father Jacques Gondret that Abbe Pierre Berge. Far be it from me absurd to blame them, since their intention was to refute the derogatory prejudice, widespread among urban dwellers and peasants under which the mountains were merely beings brutalized, stupid and ignorant.
In his excellent monograph of Saint-Veran (1928), Pierre Berge shows, like all authors, that from the XVI th century, families Queyras insisted that their sons or daughters, to receive, during the winter a true statement. Yet this priest educated, intelligent, generous, extolling the benefits of education and awards great merits to those who have studied, expresses his hostility to the laws of 1882 (so-called Jules Ferry laws) that have mandated public education for boys and girls aged 6 to 13 years. It is a paradox only in appearance and his analysis of these laws and the effects they have had in the Queyras deserves mention. His criticism is not on principles but on conditions that the legislature has imposed on future teachers so they have the right to teach, that they hold a certificate of competency issued by the academic authorities. This condition may be justified insofar as it is not unusual for the State, like any employer, requires that pays teachers they have skills attested by a diploma or a certificate of competency. However, according to Pierre Berge, this requirement has serious consequences. Have been excluded from education teachers Queyrassins, trained on the job, experienced, but who were not holders of the patent, and were replaced by young teachers from normal schools from the cities or other valleys of the Alps, and, just appointed in Queyras, had intended to leave as soon as possible. Every autumn, new teachers, even more inexperienced than the previous ones, replaced them. In fact, this was the end of the school community and school system that Queyrassins had invented and which had met for centuries. We understand that Father Berge feels nostalgia for the system he admires. From this he concludes: "The level of education has declined and soon there will not be a man capable of a Mayor" (p 194).
In reality, the successes experienced by schools throughout the twentieth century many Queyrassins partly negate this conclusion a little bitter. And if he could no longer be futures Mayor of competent jurisdiction, the cause of this was due more to the mass emigration to the fact that the regents of the village were replaced by teachers servants.
