English comes in at Angers medecine school

An initiative "unique in France" has been recently implemented in the Angers medecine faculty regarding English. Since the beginning of september, a teaching in medecine is delivered to about forty foreign students and a dozen of French students coming from Nantes and Angers. These French students presently in the third year of their studies have been selected "for their interest and their knowledge in this language" for a six month course.


That news raises a first question : either the level of scientific Angers students is very low in English (only eight come from that city), or the selection was very demanding. The result demonstrates, one more time, that the language education is in France in a bad shape, compared to the working habits, and the results, of Germany or Netherlands. That is moreover a difficulty for students whose discipline is dominated, it's not the only one in sciences, by English.


The second question, perhaps more worrying, comes from the aims of that policy : "to promote the (international?) moblity of students and their employability by international organizations". That would not be debatable if the number of medecine students in France were sufficient to meet the needs of the French population. But it's, not at all, the case. In fact the learnig of English should be, in French schools, much more anticipated and generalised on several fields of knowledge.