Were any learning institutions still open in territories occupied by Nazi germany? If so were their any major changes in the curriculum taught under Nazi rule?
Even with the defeat, schools remained opened for the beginning of the 1940 school year, so you would have had to teach starting October 1st. Your classes' effectives would have been severely reduced, as many students (those whose family had the means) would have fled to the countryside. Many would stay away from Paris for the whole war.
There is a good chance you would not have been able to attend the beginning of classes, though, as many teachers had been mobilized in the French army. Many of them were in prison camps. You could have been one of the 250 000 (about 12%) who evaded German captivity or you could have been among the 330 000 prisoners repatriated for medical reasons in March 1941.
For the year 1940-1941, nothing much would have changed, except that you would see the "vert-de-gris", German uniforms, here and there, and that you would sense a mood of hostility against teachers. Many commentators, such as Paul Claudel in Paris-Soir, were accusing you and your colleagues of being responsible for the defeat. Being back alive from the front would have made you look like a coward in the eyes of conservatives, because you were supposed to show the example and die for your country. In the Revue des Deux-Mondes during the Summer, Philippe Pétain would accuse teachers of inciting defeat by spreading pacifism and socialism, and some measures would be taken against them.
The first of these measures weren't that bad. According to an order sent on August 9th 1940, those who had "spread outdated ideas" were moved to another posting in order to start anew. Okay. On August 16th, inspectors were mandated to find teachers "not worthy enough to teach to French youth". Not too bad either, but the climate for the beginning of this first school year under the occupation is shitty, a few colleagues ratting to the authorities about the others' bad ideas or bad behavior.
On October 11th, the first coercitive measure is taken against women, as all female public servants are fired (to take care of their families). So you might lose one or two of your colleagues in the beginning of the year, having to take in their students in your half-full classes. On November 15th, you might lose another colleague or two as "past involvement" in "anti-French" groups such as the Front Populaire becomes a fireable offense. Still, it's not that much, as it is thought to amount to about 1000 teachers on the 30 000 in France, a mere 3,33%. Nothing compared to your 13 000 colleagues in German prison camps.
On October 31th, an order is given to identify all Jews teaching in French schools. For this, they rely on colleagues telling on each other. Their jobs would have to be cancelled by the beginning of December. Same thing goes for communists and freemasons. In class, though, nothing much has changed as the major reforms would come in for 1941-1942, but the figure of Pétain becomes omnipresent : songs, pictures depict the Maréchal, new heroes like Jeanne d'Arc and Vercingétorix become important. Some books are now forbidden, both by the Vichy regime and the Germans, you have to slightly change your syllabus.
Starting October 1941, every public servant has to pledge allegiance to Philippe Pétain. You do it with mental fingers crossed. Why lose your job ? A portrait of the Maréchal and a French flag are now mandatory in every class. Every Monday morning, the flag has to be raised in the schoolyard in a ceremony. Every Saturday afternoon, it has to be folded to mark the end of the week. Big reforms are planned to happen in the coming years, the main theme of teaching has to be "travail, famille, patrie", work, family, fatherland, but the new program is announced for 1946. Anyway, you teach as you always did, pretending to care about the new regime when inspectors or colleagues you can't trust are around. Repression against your Jewish students starts to intensify, but you might not see it firsthand. Some of them might disappear by the end of 1942, either because they fled to the free zone or worse.
Meanwhile, your life conditions worsen. After a short period of improvement after the Summer of 1940, when 2/3 of the city had fled and everything was missing in stores, many things become scarce. Curfews whenever some German officer gets shot by a "terrorist", no more sweet Virginian tobacco, only that crappy stuff that tastes like sawdust. Coffee ? Tea ? Chocolate ? Dream on. Maybe on the black market. Soap ? Save it. Coal ? Paris is so cold and wet during winter... You had a car ? No you hadn't, you're only a teacher. Anyway, there is no more gas for those who had one. Everybody's riding a bicycle. You even see horses coming back in the streets. Your cat ? Gone missing since two weeks. You suspect the neighbors ate it. You go back to school. Monday, somewhere in 1943. You know the Germans are losing the war since Stalingrad, some even whisper a version of "Lili Marlene" saying the Russians are coming for them. Where are the Americans ? Where are the British ? You follow them on "Radio Londres" in your friends' apartment. What are they doing in Africa ?
It's Monday. You have to raise the flag and sing "Maréchal, nous voilà!" with your students. Some are missing. You have no news from your Jewish ex-colleague who was sent in a work camp last June. Hopefully they feed him well. You are luckier, you teach. At least, you have a job for as long as you can put up with the Pétain thing.
Jean-Michel Barreau, Vichy contre l’école de la République, Flammarion, 2000.
Stéphanie Calcagni. Éducation et enseignement sous le régime de Vichy, 1940-1944. Education. 2013.
Rémy Handourtzel. Vichy ou l'échec de l'"école nationale" (été 1940-été 1944) In: L’école et la nation: Actes du séminaire scientifique international. Lyon, Barcelone, Paris, 2010 [online]. Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2013.
There is always more than can be said and I freely admit that my research is limited by the fact I do not read French or German, but the best answer a historian can give you is likely: it depends.
There are a few things I can tell you for sure about your curriculum, provided you were teaching at a non-private, non-religious high school in the city. First, a fair amount wouldn't have changed. You would still be preparing your students for entrance into French colleges and possibly even teaching khâgne (also known as classes préparatoires littéraires) for students who were looking to enter French academic and cultural elite circles by matriculating at the more exclusive French universities and programs. You would still teach and maintain the standards for "proper" French language as determined by the Académie Française and would have still taught French literature, philosophy, and culture (more on that later.) Meanwhile, the nature of your curriculum would still be shaped by decisions made at the federal level. You likely had women and men colleagues and your married women colleagues continued to teach after getting married, a norm that had been established earlier in the century and was fairly unusual for European and North American education systems.
Another thing that would have remained fairly constant was having a mixed-gender class. The French government made a number of large-scale changes related to hard gender segregation in the 1920s, following policy changes made by Leon Bérard, a long-serving Minister of National Education. These changes meant that many high schools that were previously "girls" schools adopted "boys" curriculum, making them de fact "boys" schools, and leading to more gender diversity at individual high schools. I wasn't able to find any evidence of any changes to gender configurations during the war which doesn't mean it didn't happen, but generally speaking, it doesn't appear as if the Vichy government was concerned with those particular details.
What would have changed, though, is your sense that what you were doing as a teacher was for the good of France. Between World War I and World War II, the French education system worked through a number of long-standing issues related to the funding of public and private education. While most of this related to the church's stance on what constituted a proper education for young Catholic children, there were also issues related to the role of public dollars in funding religious schools. The French Third Republic was committed to a secular education for its citizens and after lots of verbal sparring and policymaking, just before World War II, there was a sense of closure - French public high schools would focus on civics, Catholic high schools would focus on faith. The church dictated what happened in Catholic schools and the government shaped what happened in public schools and although it was a tenuous separation, it was mutually agreed upon. In effect, that changed following the occupation of the city. From Male's 1962 history of French education:
Under the Vichy government of the early 1940's, however, old wounds were reopened as the government gave public money to church schools and made religion a compulsory subject in the public schools. The latter produced such opposition from public school teachers that the decree was rescinded later in 1941. A decree of 1942 abrogated the Association Law of 1901 and allowed religious orders to organize legally. All this was encouraged by the German occupation forces as a means of dividing and weakening France.
At the same time, Vichy leaders such as Philippe Pétain encouraged French children to go to Church and his government required public school teachers to incorporate religious instruction into their curriculum (Sweets, 1986.) So, whereas before the war, you would have focused on civics and government when teaching French culture, you were now expected to teach Catholicism as part of that culture. This would have also meant that in addition to other wartime restrictions, your school likely had its budget cut as the government elected to send money to private Catholic schools. In addition to making changes related to Catholic schools and funding, the Vichy government also moved around the country's education system, especially the various approaches to higher education. Which this wouldn't have directly impacted your curriculum, it likely would have shaped how your students thought about their future after you. (Note: as far as I can tell, the general sentiment among those who study French education history is that the Vichy's efforts to restructure French education failed as the country reverted fairly quickly after the war.)
All of that said, the variable that played the greatest role in shaping your curriculum was your individual identity. In Jean Guéhenno's Diary of the Dark Years, he describes his many sleepless nights worrying about his students, worrying about being caught saying the wrong thing, worrying about other teachers. Purges were common, especially early in the war. If you survived those early purges and maintained your classroom and your position, you would have noticed a series of compounding small changes. You couldn't buy new textbooks, especially history ones, without approval. Whereas before the war you could teach your students to be proud of being French and put France in the center of all things artistic and creative, you no longer could. Not just because of the occupation and the hit the French took to their sense of self, but because such sentiments could be seen as anti-German. There were constant air raids. Children would suddenly disappear, sometimes just because there was no longer an adult to make sure they got to school. Your colleagues could suddenly disappear.
Finally, you would have seen a marked change in the students who did come to school. Whereas before, you typically engaged your students in heated discussions and debates in all areas of the curriculum, after two years of occupation, most of that fire was gone. From an English translation of Guéhenno's diary, 1943:
Every one of these young intellectuals has never thought so much about himself alone, his happiness, his joy, his career— and with such pettiness, such servility. When you talk to them of freedom or honor, they just get embarrassed. They rub their noses and lower their heads, deaf, fearing nothing so much as to be asked to do something, however little. For the past few weeks, I had the feeling they have been still more inert. ... I write these things down with great sadness: this country would be ready for servitude if its young intellectuals resigned themselves so easily to the misery of others. And then, I think I can see all too easily how the spirit can die.... In the freedom of former years, great choices were offered to these young people, and that was enough to give some of them a certain impulsion, a certain anxiety and nobility. Now they don’t even know what great choice they could make. Most of their teachers no longer dare talk about it. Discussion is forbidden. Just one kind of propaganda is permitted— nay, encouraged: the propaganda of obedience and submission.
Guéhenno, J. (2014). Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, resistance, and daily life in occupied Paris. Oxford University Press.
Male, G. A. (1963). Education in France.
Mitchell, A. (2008). Nazi Paris: the history of an occupation, 1940-1944. Berghahn Books.
Sweets, J. (1986). Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation. Oxford University Press.
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