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France faces an attitude change in education

Paris, Monday November 14th 2005
Renée DAVID AESCHLIMANN

Now it has been 18 days that youngsters, mainly of the second and third generation of Arab and black immigration, set fire to cars, schools and various public services in the suburbs of about forty French cities, among them Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse….

Today, the state of emergency declared on November 8th, has been renewed for three months.

Jacques Chirac gave a long speech today on TV to promise the return of law and order in these suburbs where criminals rule their own territories, but also more social justice for these youngsters obviously discriminated by the education system and the labour market.

France which could boast about its specific model of integration based on assimilation to the French culture, has to acknowledge that « something has gone wrong ».

And obviously it has. In these ghettoized suburbs, unemployment rises up to 40 percent of the active population. Secondary school drop-outs, who mainly belong to these communities, rise up to 60 000 each year.

So what went wrong?

The French model of integration has worked indeed, but it was based on a type of socialization through popular education, a citizen’s army, strong workers' unions. These collective elements of integration have steadily been dwindling since the seventies. The army has gone professionnal. Unemployment has been rampant with 10 percent of the active population since the 80’s.

France is now left alone with «her model». So how to bring 80 percent of a generation to the secondary school leaving certificate without pedagogically taking into account the ethnic and social diversity of its schools which now won’t disappear? How to forgive the colonial past? And simply how to acknowledge the existence of these communities while the French model strongly stands against specific rights for them in the name of unity of the Nation.

Now France is faced with the necessity of a renewal of the instruments of its model of integration if not with a change of its model itself …


Renée DAVID AESCHLIMANN is a French journalist