IN A sunlit Brittany schoolroom Marc Le Bris had just finished steering his class of ten-year-olds through their times tables when his telephone rang.

Hanging up, he said with disbelief: “That was the Presidency of the Republic. They want me to come for lunch on Wednesday.”

The entourage of Jacques Chirac is the latest member of the growing fan club of M Le Bris, 50, a former Trotskyite who is leading a crusade from the little village of Medreac against the teaching methods of modern France.

Criticised by his unions and punished by his own ministry for unorthodox methods, the village headmaster has become famous by touching a raw nerve with an angry book, And your Children will not Know how to Read and Count: The Obstinate Bankruptcy of French Schooling.

After three decades of progressive methods, France is facing a “veritable disaster”, turning out a lost generation of semi-literate, culturally ignorant youngsters, he writes.

His plea for a return to the old rituals of la dictée, rote learning and arithmetic has helped fuel a mood of nostalgia in France, which worries as much as Britain about collapsing standards. One in ten school-leavers cannot read adequately, although 80 per cent now pass the Baccalauréat, the sixth-form leaving examination.

Naturally, the guardians of the educational temple see M Le Bris as a reactionary playing to prejudice. The yearning for what his detractors call a “mythical golden age” is reflected in the success of two films: Être et Avoir (To Be and To Have), a documentary on a devoted schoolmaster, and Les Choristes, the French hope for next year’s Oscars, about a teacher who tames difficult pupils with song.

François Fillon, the minister in charge of Europe’s most centralised education system, helped to catapult M Le Bris to celebrity by praising his book this summer and inviting him for a chat.

Only a month earlier, the Brittany schools authority had denied M Le Bris a promotion because inspectors reported his failure to apply the tightly defined official techniques.

“The inspectors consider me a bandit and I am a hero to the minister,” M Le Bris joked as he recalled the ministerial audience.

To the annoyance of many teachers, M Fillon has just taken up the Breton teacher’s cause, ordering more emphasis on traditional exercises such as dictée and essay writing. “The system has had too much innovation which has been badly digested and ultimately caused disappointment,” the minister said.

Standing at the blackboard before his pupils, M Le Bris looks nothing like the stern instituteur — primary school teacher — of pre-modern days. The grey-coated institueur has become familiar this month with a Gallic version of Channel 4’s school reality show That Will Teach Them. Warm and enthusiastic, M Le Bris holds his 25 pupils’ attention with banter as they compete in a demanding oral arithmetic. They call him Marc, not Monsieur.

In the class is William Bradshaw, ten, who arrived last February from Brentwood, Essex. “I like it a lot,” he said, comparing Medreac with his English school. “It is just plain better here. The teachers are much more strict if you do something wrong but they are kinder if you don’t.”

Joanne Bradshaw, his mother, had high praise for the school, saying that she was grateful at the care that M Le Bris and his team had taken in teaching William French from scratch. “They swept him up from the first day and he was motivated,” she said.

By British or American standards, the French system remains rigorous, with attention still placed on grammar, spelling and recitation, but basic skills have declined as emphasis has been laid on encouraging creativity, “global” reading methods and modern maths. M Le Bris, who jokingly blames the “Anglo-Saxons” for starting the rot, said: “If the kids are left to discover the world for themselves, you go back to being primitives.”

France has curbed some of the excesses over the past decade, but the ministry and unions remain under the dictatorship of “Stalinist” progressives, he said. Many teachers are rebelling and secretly returning to the old ways. “They often keep secret exercise books that are hidden from the inspectors,” he added. “It’s schizophrenic. We are doing clandestine grammar”.

Among the practices adopted by M Le Bris is the 15-times table, a skill which is unthinkable in ordinary primary schools but which his pupils manage without great difficulty, he said.

M Le Bris, the son of primary school teachers, preaches with the ardour of the converted, because he was himself the product of the Seventies educational enlightenment, an extreme left-wing militant with a mission. As a young teacher, he noticed the successes of an old instituteur in a neighbouring school.

“Little by little I borrowed his approach,” he said. “More dictée, more reading out loud. I gradually ejected all the dogma that had indoctrinated me and I got results.”

Now that he is famous, M Le Bris is under attack from the progressive world. Le Monde, bible of the left-wing establishment, this week splashed its front page with a critical report on M Le Bris and the nostalgia boom. Herve Hamon, a member of the state High Council for Evaluating Schools, told the paper: “People do not know how much schools in the 1950s were brutal, improvised and low-performing.”

M Le Bris, whose wife, Caty, teaches in his school, is angered by claims that he is playing into right-wing hands: “I don’t give a hoot. There is no right or left teaching. I just know what works when I have 25 kids on my hands.”

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