This article appears in “Le Monde de l’Éducation”. If you are subscribed Worldyou can subscribe to this weekly letter by clicking this link.
Haro about separatism! On the subject of education, one would almost be delighted to hear a concert of left-wing voices (see, for example, the recent work of Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and François Dubet, School ghetto. End separatismSeuil, 144 pages, €12.90) joins what has been delivered by the government and its leader Gabriel Attal for the purpose of communicating what its general policy should be.
From the point of view of “separatism”, we know the findings: the separation of students according to their environment of origin, between schools, private or public, where they should nevertheless learn to live together and form a society, or between different classes of the same establishment, with the consequence of the violence of the social predestination of individuals greater than as it is in most countries.
We also know the long-standing inability of French governments to act against this state of affairs, despite some successful attempts to voluntarily organize the development of social diversity among schools. Let us therefore ask ourselves the question: is this impotence of governments the result of indifference to the problem (it was clear to some) or the inability to really make room for something other than “separatism” easily condemn and exonerate the French education system from one of its major, blocking and dangerous defects?
This question is delicate because we are aware of the whole arsenal of imagination that arms school selection in our country with slogans like equal opportunity or Republican elitism. School is not really a game of chance who loses or wins, but a matter of childhood and emancipation through access to knowledge. Nor does it have as its central goal the creation of an “elite” – which, by the way, should be referred to in the plural!
Two orders with different cultures
And as always, the imagination uses words, uses our words, to make us believe that they denote some insurmountable “natural” reality. However, the vocabulary and the deeper realities of the school are saturated with separatisms that remain unnoticed and that are even inappropriate to point out. If we do this, it is because long experience with foreign systems shows us what depends on the school lexicons of our country and the formatting they produce in our minds.
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