[lg policy] Are Arabic Schools in France Hotbeds for Radicalism?

[Harold Schiffman]

Are Arabic Schools in France Hotbeds for Radicalism?
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*Secret report accuses French heritage-language programs of ghettoizing and
radicalizing French-born youth*

French conservatives are in an uproar over a 2013 report that recently
surfaced accusing a nearly 40-year-old after-school heritage language
program of teaching “Islamic catechism” and radicalizing young French
students from immigrant families. France’s now-dissolved High Council on
Integration (Haut Conseil à l’intégration, or HCI), which was a government
council concerned with how foreign-born people living in France integrated
into French society, wrote a confidential report to the Prime Minister on
the Teaching of Language and Culture of Origin Program (ELCO), criticizing
the program for fostering communitarianism among third- or
fourth-generation immigrants and their heritage communities instead of
promoting assimilation. In the French media, the scandal is not just
because of the report’s recommendations, but also that the report remained
a secret for nearly two years.

The ELCO program was established in the 1970’s and is the fruit of
bilateral agreements between France and Algeria, Croatia, Italy, Morocco,
Portugal, Serbia, Tunisia and Turkey to educate the children of migrants in
their mother tongues and cultures to complement their French educations.
The HCI’s report slams ELCO as an anachronism that serves students who are
not the children of migrants temporarily in France, rather of immigrant
families who have made France home.

One former member of the HCI, Guylain Chevrier, remarked, “Before as part
of temporary immigration, ELCO could be justified. Today amidst permanent
immigration in a context of ghettoization and community disintegration, the
priority should not be to maintain contact with the culture of origin,
rather on integration.”

Most troubling to the authors of the HCI report are cultural texts that
mention Islam or promote Islamic values for classes full of French-born
students. The vast majority of the today’s ELCO students, about 76,000 of
86,000, are studying Arabic (60,000) or Turkish (16,000). Proponents of the
ELCO program point to the lack of Arabic-language education available at
French public schools, and fear that dismantling ELCO will prompt parents
to put their children in faith-based programs that will further segregate
them and “radicalize” them. The authors of the study insist that in order
to prevent young French students of Turkish and Arab descent from being
ghettoized, that the government should emphasize the importance of the
French language and culture.

France has been experiencing a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, which
could explain the scathing report on ELCO’s after-school program grounded
in speculation. An Ipsos survey from January revealed that 66% of the
French believe that France has too many foreigners, and 59% believe that
immigrants do not try hard enough to integrate.

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